What is Consent Theater?
The cookie banner looks like a request for permission, but on many sites the profiling trackers fire the moment the page loads — before you have touched anything. Your choice arrives after the data has already left.
Where it comes from
EU ePrivacy 'Cookie Law' (2011)
How it hooks you
Exploits the illusion of control: being asked feels like protection, so you stop questioning what actually happened before the question appeared.
What the research shows
Researchers auditing European websites found 49% installed profiling cookies before the visitor gave any consent at all.
Source: Trevisan et al., '4 Years of EU Cookie Law: Results and Lessons Learned' (PoPETs 2019)
How to resist it
Blocking beats consenting: a browser with tracking protection (Firefox, Brave) or uBlock Origin stops trackers before the page loads — which is more than the banner ever did.