Cookie banners, refused automatically

Some sites show a wall instead of a banner: accept, pay or leave. There’s no free refusal to click. By default, AdHole doesn’t remove these walls: removing one isn’t the same as refusing cookies, and the choice is yours.

If you decide otherwise, turn on “Remove consent walls” in the settings. AdHole then removes the ones it recognises and gives the page its scroll back; many slip past it. Some sites refuse to load without your consent.

Walls that keep an article for subscribers are never removed, whatever the setting: that isn’t a cookie question.

The refusal runs in the pages AdHole filters: those of the browsers on the computer where it’s installed. Chrome, Edge and Brave directly, and on Windows Firefox too, since its version 120.

On an Android phone, the app does the same in the phone’s browsers, once you install by hand the root certificate it creates there. Firefox asks for one more setting, and telling which app a connection belongs to takes Android 10 or newer. Inside the phone’s other apps, nothing is refused: AdHole doesn’t look in there.

It doesn’t run on the sites left encrypted, such as banks, payment and health services, because AdHole doesn’t look inside them. There, you refuse yourself.

One switch in the settings turns it off: “Refuse cookie banners”.

A cookie banner is part of the page. A DNS filter only sees server names: it can refuse a server, not click a button inside a page.

That’s why AdHole refuses banners in the browsers it filters — this computer’s, and an Android phone’s with the app — and not on your TV or your console, even when their DNS points to it. Pointing a phone’s DNS at it isn’t enough either: that takes the app, and its certificate.