What is Intentional Consent?

Intentional consent puts clarity and control in the visitor’s hands. The idea is simple: people should understand what runs and why, choose deliberately, and change that choice later without friction. Cookie Compliance builds the banner, wording, and logging around that principle.

The idea behind Intentional Consent

• Accountable by design. The system records the decision and the enabled purposes so you can demonstrate how and when consent happened.
• Clarity over tactics. The experience explains purposes in plain language and avoids dark patterns. By default, scrolling or timeouts never count as consent (Consent on Scroll and Consent on Click stay off unless you turn them on).
• Parity of choices. The level choices stand side by side as equal options, and Private declines everything except Basic Operations. Visitors can also open details before acting.
• Purpose-bound use. Consent enables only the purposes a visitor selects—nothing extra.
• Reversible and respectful. An Update consent icon stays available. People can revisit or withdraw their choice at any time.

How Cookie Compliance expresses consent

Cookie Compliance uses two layers that visitors and teams can understand:

• Access Levels — human-friendly presets: Private, Balanced, Personalized.
• Purpose Categories — the “why” behind processing: Basic Operations, Site Optimization, Content Personalization, Ad Personalization.

Access Levels toggle those purposes in a way that matches your policy. The banner shows the presets; the application holds the mapping.

Consent choices: 2 or 3 options

You choose whether the banner presents two or three choices:

• Two choices:
  • Private or Reject — Basic Operations only (the strict, privacy-first choice)
  • Personalized or Accept — all purposes enabled, as configured
• Three choices:
  • Private or Reject — Basic Operations only
  • Balanced or Accept Some — your declared “middle” preset
  • Personalized or Accept All — measurement + personalization, as configured

Choose the model that best fits your policy and audience. The wording and layout keep both paths equally visible.

Default consent level (before any action)

Before a visitor acts, the banner uses one site-wide default consent level defined in the application. Geolocation does not change it; per region it controls whether the banner shows, whether Autoblocking applies, whether the Update consent icon appears and which policy links show. The default does not imply acceptance—it only sets the starting posture the page follows until the visitor chooses (preselected on the Classic engine; the New engine preselects nothing).

Consent duration

Cookie Compliance uses a Duration parameter to control how long consent remains valid and when the banner asks again after it expires. You can offer a Consent duration selector to let visitors choose from options including 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or other intervals, or hide it and rely on your preset.

Duration should match your legal basis and policy. Visitors can revoke or change their choice earlier via the Update consent icon.

Before consent: prior protection

• Non-essential scripts are held. Where Autoblocking applies, scripts and iframes that match providers in your catalog stay held until the visitor chooses. The file may download, but it does not run. Two limits: a script that an already-allowed script adds later is not held, and on the Free plan blocking stops once the site passes its visit limit for the current cycle.
• GPC (if enabled). When a browser sends Global Privacy Control, Cookie Compliance starts in a protected state and treats sale/sharing-related purposes (typically Ad Personalization) as off until the visitor explicitly opts in.
• Geolocation rules. With Geolocation on, each region (EU, UK, South Africa, California, other US states, Canada, Brazil, Other) gets its own rule for banner display, Autoblocking, the Update consent icon and policy links. The banner shows the same choices and the same default level everywhere.

After consent: immediate, consistent behavior

• The banner updates the running state right away; no page reload required.
• Consent Modes—Google, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft—read the same state. Tags degrade gracefully before consent and expand only after the visitor accepts the relevant purposes.
• Revoke or change saves the new choice at once; providers already running on the page keep running until it reloads. On the next load, only the allowed providers run.