The legal requirement for clear and equally conspicuous cookie consent options has been established for some time. However, recent rulings from the District Courts of Cologne and Rostock mark a turning point toward stricter enforcement of these requirements. These decisions reinforce the need for transparent and unambiguous consent mechanisms on websites.
It’s crucial for website operators to ensure their cookie banners comply with these legal standards, as authorities are intensifying their efforts to check for compliance.
The Reject button allows your users to reject all cookies at once. Here’s an example of iubenda’s cookie banner with a valid reject button:
This feature is required for users who operate in the UK, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Germany, France, and Ireland.
Please note that there are slight differences in each country’s requirements regarding the reject button:
🇬🇧 If you are operating in the UK, it’s best to give users the choice between accepting and rejecting all cookies alongside handles to customize their choices.
However, it must be noted that the ICO does not explicitly require “reject all” buttons. Therefore, as long as the available choices are all equally conspicuous, an alternative between “accept all” and “customize” seems to be fine, as long as by choosing the latter, no consent is implied.
🇮🇹 If you are operating in Italy, the banner must contain:
🇫🇷 🇩🇪 If you are operating in France and Germany, Accept and Reject buttons must be equally conspicuous.
🇪🇸 If you are operating in Spain, the cookie banner (or any other alternative method of attaining consent) must be presented in a prominent place and format on the viewer’s screen. It must include both Accept and Reject buttons at the same level. The option to reject cookies cannot be more complex than the possibility to accept cookies. In other words, the option to reject cookies should be made as easy as it is to accept them.
For more information on each DPOs specific requirements, check out our GDPR cookie consent cheatsheet.
While suggesting it as best practice, other countries like Greece and Belgium currently don’t explicitly require the use of the Reject button. In any case, if present, it should have the same prominence as the Accept button.
Here’s where our cookie consent management solution comes in very handy: it allows you to easily generate a cookie banner with Reject button, seamlessly collect consent, implement prior blocking, set advertising preferences and more.
As with most other elements in the Cookie Solution, the color and text of the Reject button are fully customizable.
