Rejected petition Change default cookie consent policy from "Accept All" to "Accept Essential"

Rejected on 25 July 2022

Cookies are everywhere and companies benefit from unknowing/lazy users who accept the default setting to quickly access a website. It cannot be this easy these days to gather such valuable information and we need to stand up to CHANGE ALL BUT ESSENTIAL COOKIES TO BE AN OPT IN POLICY.

Make it harder for websites to collect personal information from users. All Non-Essential cookies should REQUIRE CONSENT, where consent means an active choice on the part of the user: so opt-in, not opt-out.
"Legitimate Interest" should fall under the category of non-essential and hence should also be opt-in and disabled by default, allowing users to click "Accept Essential", excluding legitimate interest, by having the default changed (most websites still have legitimate interested enabled)

Why was this petition rejected?

It’s not clear what the petition is asking the UK Government or Parliament to do.

While we can see that you'd like changes to how cookie banners operate, it's not clear exactly what you'd like the Government to do. There is currently no default cookie consent policy that has been specified by the Government.

You could start a petition asking the Government to remove the requirement for explicit consent for non-essential cookies.

We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.