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

Refuses on: OneTrust, Didomi, Sourcepoint, Usercentrics, Quantcast Choice, Cookiebot, TrustArc, Iubenda, ConsentManager, CookieYes, Complianz, Commanders Act, Sirdata, Osano, BigID and DataGrail — plus the in-house consent layers of MediaMarkt/Saturn, eMAG and WP Holding.

Recognises and deliberately leaves alone: consent-or-pay walls, including those on German publishers running Sourcepoint's Pur-Abo, Reach plc titles on Quantcast, and the Italian news sites la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. On those pages there is nothing to refuse: the only available button means consenting, so pressing it would be the opposite of the point. You are told what was found, and why nothing was done.

Several platforms ship more than one banner layout — Usercentrics and ConsentManager each needed two separate rules, because the same product renders differently from one customer to the next. Every rule here was written by inspecting the real markup on live websites, then executed against those sites for real: the refusal was clicked, and the page measured afterwards for blocked scrolling, leftover overlays and lost navigation. Rules that closed the banner but left the page damaged were not shipped.

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.