Refusenik — Reject Cookie Banners Autor: Refusenik

Most cookie banner blockers hide the banner with CSS. It disappears from view, but no refusal is ever registered: the site still believes you made no choice, scroll-blocking overlays stay where they are, and the banner comes back tomorrow.

Refusenik clicks the actual refusal path. Where a consent platform requires it, it opens the preferences panel, clears the optional categories, and saves.

WHAT IT COLLECTS: NOTHING

No telemetry. No analytics. No "anonymous usage statistics". Nothing is sent anywhere while you browse, and there is no server that knows you installed this.

The single exception is under your finger: if a banner is not handled, you can press a button to report it. The report contains the domain, the detected consent platform, and the extension version — and you are shown the exact text before anything is sent. Nothing leaves your browser unless you press that button.

The source code is public under the GPL, so none of the above has to be taken on trust. You can read it, and so can anyone else.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

On a site whose consent platform it does not recognise, Refusenik does nothing at all. It will not guess, and it will not click a button it does not understand — acting on a page we cannot read is how these extensions break the web. You get a report button instead.

Some sites offer no refusal at all: consent to tracking, or pay for a subscription. There is nothing to refuse on those pages, so Refusenik leaves them alone and tells you why. Clicking the only available button would mean consenting, which is the opposite of the point.

SUPPORTED CONSENT PLATFORMS

Verified on live websites: OneTrust, Didomi, Iubenda, Cookiebot, TrustArc and Osano.

Also included, with less field verification so far: Usercentrics, Quantcast, BigID and DataGrail. Some platforms ship more than one banner layout, and rules that have not met every layout in the wild are the ones most likely to come up short.

That distinction is not the usual thing to print on a store page, and it is the point: rules were checked against real websites rather than written from documentation. In a sweep of 48 European sites, each refusal was clicked for real and the page measured afterwards — no blocked scrolling, no leftover overlays, no lost navigation, on any of them.

Consent-or-pay walls on Italian news sites are recognised too, and deliberately left alone.

WHY UPDATES MATTER MORE THAN FEATURES

Consent platforms change their layouts, and every rule eventually goes stale. This is not a category where the best idea wins; it is one where whoever keeps maintaining wins. Every abandoned alternative in this space stopped shipping updates first and lost its users second.

Refusenik separates the rules from the extension: rules are signed data, fetched at runtime, so a fix for a site that broke this morning reaches you in minutes instead of waiting on a store review. The extension itself never downloads or runs remote code — Firefox does not allow it, and neither do we.