There's a specific kind of tired that comes from clicking "reject non-essential cookies" for the four hundredth time this month. It's not hard, it's just relentless, and it adds up to real time you're never getting back.
Here's the actual fix, in order of effort.
Option 1: Turn off third-party cookies in Chrome itself
Chrome has a setting, Settings > Privacy and security > Third-party cookies, that can block third-party cookies outright. This helps with tracking, but it does not make the banners go away. Most sites are legally required to ask about cookies regardless of your browser settings, so you'll still see the popup, you'll just be answering a question your browser already answered for you. Worth turning on anyway, but it's not a fix for the banner fatigue itself.
Option 2: Use a browser built-in tracking protection mode
Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection and Chrome's upcoming privacy sandbox changes reduce what trackers can do, but again, they don't touch the consent banner UI. Different problem, different layer.
Option 3: Install an extension that clicks reject for you
This is the actual fix for the actual annoyance. Extensions like Consent-O-Matic, Ghostery, or GetPawsOff maintain a set of rules for how common consent-banner platforms are built (which vendor's popup it is, where its buttons live, whether they're sitting inside a shadow DOM or an iframe to make them harder to script against), and click through the reject flow automatically the moment the page loads, sometimes before you've even seen the banner. You get the legal protection of having "rejected," without spending your day doing the clicking.
But there's a second, different category worth knowing about, because it solves a different problem: extensions like I Don't Care About Cookies work by hiding or auto-dismissing the banner, not by clicking reject. That can mean the banner just disappears while the site quietly treats you as having accepted everything, since nothing was ever actually declined. Faster and less janky-looking, but it's a privacy tradeoff, not a shortcut to the same outcome. If your goal is "stop seeing the popup," either style works. If your goal is "actually reject the tracking," you want the reject-style tools, not the hide-style ones. Worth also knowing who owns the tool: I Don't Care About Cookies was acquired by Avast in 2022, and Avast itself has a real FTC data-selling settlement in its history, which is a separate question from what the extension itself currently discloses collecting.
The important detail, and the reason to be a little picky about which reject-style extension you use here: a good one should only ever reject or stand down, never accept on your behalf. If an extension is clicking "Accept All" to make banners disappear faster, it's solving your annoyance by making your privacy problem worse. Check what an extension actually does before trusting it with this job, most reputable ones (including the ones named above) are open source specifically so you can verify that.
Option 4: Pause it, don't fight it, on sites where it breaks something
Every rule-based approach will occasionally clash with a site that built its banner in some genuinely unusual way. The fix isn't to give up on the whole idea, it's to use whatever "pause on this site" feature your extension has (most of the ones mentioned here include one) so that one weird site doesn't cost you the convenience everywhere else.
Do this once, properly, and cookie banners stop being a daily tax on your attention. That's really the whole trick, most privacy fixes aren't complicated, they're just tedious enough that nobody bothers, until they automate the tedious part.
A few quick questions
- Does this actually stop tracking, or just hide the banner?
- Depends entirely on which extension you pick, see the reject-vs-hide distinction above. A reject-style tool declines the tracking. A hide-style one just removes the popup from your screen, the tracking may still happen behind it.
- Will an extension like this break any websites?
- Occasionally, yes. Every rule-based tool will eventually hit a banner built in some unusual way, and the automated click can land somewhere it shouldn't. That's what Option 4 is for, pause it on that one site rather than judging the whole tool by one bad interaction.
- Is it even legal for a site to keep showing me the banner anyway?
- Depends on the site's implementation and your jurisdiction, but under GDPR a site generally isn't supposed to re-prompt you every single visit once you've made a choice, and definitely shouldn't ignore an automated, consistent rejection just because it wasn't a human clicking. In practice, enforcement here is inconsistent, which is exactly why automating the click yourself is more reliable than hoping every site behaves.