"Cookie Honesty" Checker Tool. Discover if that "Decline Cookies" button actually works
"Many websites claim to respect your privacy with a 'Decline Cookies' button - but in reality, most of these buttons don't actually block tracking cookies. They simply close the banner while hidden scripts continue to run in the background. At The Laughing Professor, we believe in real transparency - no trick banners, no tracking behind your back."
So yes - true for a lot of websites: "Declining" is just a button, not a guarantee.
It is possible to use DEV console to test in real time what is going on when you click the 'Decline Button', by entering this snippet in to the Dev Console:
// Reveal what cookies exist after interacting with consent banners
console.log("===
Current cookies ===");
console.log(document.cookie.split("; ").join("\n")
|| "No cookies found.");// List all localStorage + sessionStorage
items (often used for tracking)
console.log("\n=== Local Storage ===");
for
(let i = 0; i < localStorage.length; i++) {
console.log(localStorage.key(i)
+ " = " + localStorage.getItem(localStorage.key(i)));
}
console.log("\n===
Session Storage ===");
for (let i = 0; i < sessionStorage.length; i++)
{
console.log(sessionStorage.key(i) + " = " + sessionStorage.getItem(sessionStorage.key(i)));
}
//
Check for common 3rd-party trackers or analytics scripts
console.log("\n===
External tracking scripts loaded ===");
[...document.scripts].forEach(s
=> {
if (s.src.match(/google|analytics|tagmanager|facebook|doubleclick|adservice|quant|hotjar|bing|yahoo|tiktok|criteo|segment/i))
{
console.log("Possible tracker:", s.src);
}
});