Consent-O-Matic

Nearly all websites use tracking technologies to collect data about you. By law, they often need your permission, which is why many websites have “consent pop-ups”. However, 90% of these pop-ups use so-called “dark patterns”, which are designed to make it very difficult to say no, but very easy to say yes. Although using dark patterns is illegal, the laws are not enforced enough, so many websites get away with it.

Consent-O-Matic is a browser extension that recognizes CMP (Consent Management Provider) pop-ups that have become ubiquitous on the web and automatically fills them out based on your preferences – even if you meet a dark pattern design. Sometimes a website might not use standard categories, and in that case, Consent-O-Matic will always try to submit the most privacy preserving settings.

We try our best to keep up to date with most variants of pop-ups but you might see pop-ups Consent-O-Matic can't handle yet. If you do, we are grateful if you will use the extension's mechanism to anonymously report the site to us so we can update the rules. You do so by clicking the extension icon and press "Let us know" (on iOS press the small puzzle piece in the location bar first). We also welcome contributions to rules, see how at our GitHub repository in the Source section.

You can install the extension in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge for the desktop and Safari for mobile.

Developed by

Install

Source code

Consent-O-Matic is open source and the source is available on Github.

Privacy policy

Extension

The Consent-O-Matic extension does not process any personal data. The only data that Consent-O-Matic stores (on your computer) are:

To delete all this data, simply uninstall the browser extension. To delete the counts of pop-ups and clicks without uninstalling, go to the About page in the extension settings and click the Clear button.

When you install Consent-O-Matic, you will see a pop-up from your browser that says it can "access your data for all websites" (or something similar depending on which browser you use). You get this warning because Consent-O-Matic needs access to the code of the website you're visiting to detect if there are any consent pop-ups and interact with them. We do not collect any data about the website you're visiting or what you do on the website: this warning is about what the extension has permission to do from the browser, not what it actually does.

The only time we will know which website you visit is when you report to us that the extension is not working on a particular page by clicking on the Let us know! button in the settings. In that case we receive a message on our server with the URL, which we store and look at to improve our coverage. The list of URLs might also be shared with other developers in the open-source community to further improve the extension. As part of how the web works, we will also receive your IP address when you send this URL, but we do not access or store this data. We process the IP on the basis of legitimate interest (i.e., we can't not receive it when you report a website).

Website

When visiting the Consent-O-Matic website, your web browser automatically sends the following information to our web server:

We process this data based on legitimate interest to be able to evaluate system security, stability, and performance. We store this data for up to 90 days, after which it is deleted automatically. This data is not shared with any third parties.

Since this is personal data, you have the right to access, erasure, rectification, and portability. If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us with (a list of) your IP address(es).

Contact us

If you find bugs or have feature requests please use the issue tracker on Github.
For other enquiries reach out to us:
Midas Nouwens
Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose