The cookie banner most of you won't see

We wanted analytics. We did not want a cookie wall.

Those feel like the same decision. They’re not. The banner exists because of consent law, and consent law isn’t one rule — it’s a map. The EEA, the UK, and Switzerland want opt-in: no cookies until you say yes. Most of the rest of the world, the US included, is opt-out: analytics runs, you can leave.

A single global banner treats every visitor like they’re in Berlin. It punishes the ninety percent to cover the ten.

Google built the way out of this and gave it a boring name. Consent Mode v2. You set a default — analytics granted — and then a second default that denies it for a list of regions. The EEA, the UK, Switzerland. The important part is the part you don’t write: Google enforces that region list by IP. We don’t have to know where you are. They already do.

So the cookies behave correctly on their own. A visitor in France gets nothing stored until they accept. A visitor in Nevada gets counted and never thinks about it. That’s true before our banner does anything at all.

Which means the banner isn’t enforcing anything. It’s just UI.

We show it with a timezone check. If your browser says Europe/Something and you haven’t chosen yet, the panel slides up. Everyone else never sees it. And if the timezone guess is wrong — a French traveler in a Vegas hotel, a VPN, whatever — it doesn’t matter. Consent Mode already did the real work by IP. The banner is allowed to be sloppy because it isn’t the thing keeping anyone safe.

I kept waiting for this to get hard. It mostly didn’t. The work wasn’t building the banner — it was deciding who shouldn’t have to look at one.

The rest was a privacy page in plain words, and a “manage cookies” link that reopens the panel from anywhere, so saying no later is as easy as saying yes now.

Most people who read this site will load it, get counted, and never learn the banner exists. That was the whole idea.