Cookie Consent feels like it punishes the good site owners
thanks. I've been out of the whole web loop for years and am just wrapping my head around all of these latest developments. I get what you are saying. My money is tight and it's nice to have a feature like this at the CDN. I wasn't anticipating a huge drop in analytics information simply due to trying to be proactive in the US ahead of most other websites. It's almost as if by accepting a good practice, you get punished from a traffic and SEO standpoint.
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As someone in North America (Mackenly is in EU region I believe and may have more EU perspectives) - I agree with the generalized sentiment here. Cookie consent is a deeply misguided thing though very well intentioned and does "punish the good people" so to speak. Many users just won't click if the cookie consent popup is not obtrusive (and its legally required in some regions to not be an obstructive modal), users who do click are probable to click reject just because they were given a choice to (even if they don't care when other sites don't ask), and even worse cookie consent compromises many browser security features that require user interaction to perform an action like playing a video with sound, going full screen, or even capturing the mouse pointer, etc. Its a bad solution to a good concern for privacy. IMHO, privacy things like this should have been built into the user agent (the browser) and not in the website code - just like how we evolved HTTPS over the years showing indicators in the address bar, etc. All that said - we are unlikely to come to a world wide agreement on this and that is why many here handle cookie consent differently for the EU than for the US or other regions. If no one can agree - we just have to adapt to local laws and regulations. That is where CloudFlare can help buy giving us some geo info to know if visitors coming from particular regions like EU and/or particular countries.
All that said, with google consent mode v2 doesn't it still gather analytics without consent but its just anonymized and a 2nd visitor from a user would just be seen a "new user" because they have no cookie recording the prior visit? I thought consent mode v2 was meant to allow loading the analytics tool but just change what data was persisted and how it was processed.
I'm in the US as well, but I work on multinational sites, so I have to be familiar with it. I agree that when trying to be a good person by not loading things by default, you often end up not getting a ton of really valuable analytics data, ruining the statistical integrity of anything you collect because of your forced sampling method.
This doc shows how to only show consent for EU users. Basically if an EU country shows the consent box, else it grants consent to everything.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/zaraz/consent-management/api/#restricting-consent-checks-based-on-location
Cloudflare Docs
Consent API · Cloudflare Zaraz docs
The Consent API allows you to programmatically control all aspects of the Consent Management program. This includes managing the modal, the consent …