What a cookie banner is asking
In the European Union, a site needs your consent before it stores or reads anything on your device that isn’t strictly needed for what you asked it to do. As Europe’s data protection authorities put it, “by default, no cookies which require consent can be set without a consent”, and that consent has to come from a positive action on your part (EDPB, January 2023).
Some cookies need no consent at all: the one that keeps your basket, the one that keeps you logged in, the one that remembers your refusal, and in France, audience measurement kept strictly to the site’s own use (CNIL, in French). The banner asks about everything else: targeted advertising, tracking across sites, most analytics, social media buttons.
What refusing changes, and what it doesn’t
- The site still works. Strictly necessary cookies don’t depend on your answer: your basket, your login and your language stay.
- You still see ads. Refusing turns targeted ads into contextual ones, chosen from the page you’re reading and a rough idea of where you are, rather than from your history. Google describes its “non-personalized ads” this way, and notes that they still use cookies “for frequency capping and aggregated ad reporting” (Google Ad Manager Help).
- The banner comes back. A site has to remember your refusal, and it does so with a cookie. Clear your cookies or change browser, and it asks again. In France, the CNIL considers keeping a choice for about six months good practice (CNIL).
- Some sites put up a wall. “Accept, or pay” walls exist. The CNIL judges them case by case. For large online platforms, the European data protection authorities said in April 2024 that in most cases, a choice between consenting and paying can’t produce valid consent (EDPB).
- You don’t become invisible. A refusal covers what the banner asks about. The site’s server still sees your IP address, as every server you connect to does.
Why “Reject all” is so hard to find
Because every acceptance feeds targeted advertising, and every refusal doesn’t. Regulators have catalogued the tricks. In January 2023, the European authorities’ joint cookie-banner taskforce went through the most common ones (EDPB report):
- no reject button on the first screen, only “Accept” and “Settings”;
- boxes already ticked behind “Settings”;
- “refuse” as a link lost in a paragraph of text, or placed outside the banner;
- button colours and contrast that steer you towards “Accept”.
A vast majority of the authorities consider a banner without a way to refuse, on the layer that has the accept button, an infringement; and pre-ticked boxes don’t give valid consent. In France, the CNIL fined Google €150 million and Facebook €60 million on 31 December 2021, because refusing cookies on google.fr, youtube.com and facebook.com took several clicks while accepting took one (DLA Piper). Its rule since then is short: refusing must be as easy as accepting.
Having it clicked for you
Clicking “Reject all” dozens of times a week is exactly the kind of chore software is for. There are three ways to hand it over.
A consent extension. Consent-O-Matic, made by researchers at Aarhus University, fills in consent pop-ups for you according to your preferences, in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. It is free and open source (Consent-O-Matic).
A blocker that hides banners. Some ad blockers can simply hide cookie banners. Hiding isn’t refusing, though: the site never gets an answer. Under EU rules, no answer should mean no consent, since nothing that needs consent may be set without it; a clear refusal just leaves no room for interpretation.
A filter for the whole computer. That’s what AdHole does on a Windows or Linux PC. When a cookie banner offers to reject all, it clicks it for you, on the consent tools most sites use, such as Didomi, OneTrust, Cookiebot, Axeptio or tarteaucitron. It only looks for refusal buttons. On Windows, it works in every browser on the computer, Chrome, Edge, Brave and Firefox (version 120 and later), and it’s on by default; you can switch it off in the dashboard.
Its limits:
- A banner with no way to refuse stays. AdHole doesn’t try to accept to make it go away. Pop-ups that demand your consent without a free way to refuse also stay; a setting, off to begin with, removes some of them, the ones it recognises.
- It can pick the wrong button. On a few sites it clicks “Accept”, or a refusal that leads to a payment page. If your choice matters on a site, check it through the site’s “Cookies” link.
- Only this computer’s browsers. Not apps, not the TV. A DNS filter on its own can’t do any of this: it sees site names, not buttons.
What stays: walls for subscribers
A wall in front of an article reserved for subscribers isn’t a cookie question. It’s a business decision, not a request for consent, and refusing cookies has nothing to do with it. AdHole never removes a subscriber-only wall. “Accept or pay” consent walls are a different case: AdHole leaves them in place by default; a setting you choose to turn on removes the ones it recognises, not all of them.
Sources checked on 5 October 2026 and linked in the text.