
How to Shift Data Privacy Left
The 1:10:100 rule—coined in 1992 by George Labovitz and Yu Sang...
Read NowGet an overview of the simple, all-in-one data privacy platform
Manage consent for data privacy laws in 50+ countries
Streamline and automate the DSAR workflow
Efficiently manage assessment workflows using custom or pre-built templates
Streamline consent, utilize non-cookie data, and enhance customer trust
Automate and visualize data store discovery and classification
Ensure your customers’ data is in good hands
Key Features & Integrations
Discover how Osano supports CPRA compliance
Learn about the CCPA and how Osano can help
Achieve compliance with one of the world’s most comprehensive data privacy laws
Key resources on all things data privacy
Expert insights on all things privacy
Key resources to further your data privacy education
Meet some of the 5,000+ leaders using Osano to transform their privacy programs
A guide to data privacy in the U.S.
What's the latest from Osano?
Data privacy is complex but you're not alone
Join our weekly newsletter with over 35,000 subscribers
Global experts share insights and compelling personal stories about the critical importance of data privacy
Osano CEO, Arlo Gilbert, covers the history of data privacy and how companies can start a privacy program
Upcoming webinars and in-person events designed for privacy professionals
The Osano story
Become an Osanian and help us build the future of privacy!
We’re eager to hear from you
Interested in partnering with us?
Increase Trust. Stay Compliant. Get Cool Swag.
Inquiries and Osano in the news
Add Osano data privacy ratings and recommendations to your application
Guaranteed compliance with no legal, privacy, or technical expertise required. Too good to be true? Not this time.
Whether your organization needs to comply with one law or 100, Osano Cookie Consent does the hard work for you. Rapidly deploy banners designed and maintained by our experts—for 95+ regulations, in 50+ countries, and in 45+ languages.
Complicated configurations and maintenance, minimal to nonexistent support, and extra costs: Who needs that? Invest in a solution that actually reduces your workload instead of shifting it around or requiring outside consultants.
You’ve got a lot to manage, and cookie compliance is a persistent pain that takes time away from more strategic work. Make it a simple task instead of a time suck with a solution that stays current with existing regulations and implements changes across sites and jurisdictions.
Most cookie consent providers just hand you the tools, cash your check, and wish you good luck. Osano is your partner in privacy, giving you information and insight on regulations, adjusting your banners to keep up, and acting as your in-house privacy expert whenever you have a question.
Compliance shouldn’t complicate and confuse. Osano gets you to cookie compliance—and that’s that. No unexpected maintenance, no dark patterns, no hidden fees, no drawn-out implementations. Just confidence and peace of mind.
Paste one line of JavaScript to your website’s header and get started in minutes, not days. Osano automatically localizes your cookie consent banner for 45+ languages and 95+ regulations across 50+ countries.
Use our pre-designed, pre-approved banner templates or customize them to match your brand. Built-in guardrails prevent you from falling out of compliance.
See what banners look like for users in different regions. Test banner placements on your website to ensure an unobstructed user experience.
Identify your website's cookies automatically, with AI-driven recommendations for cookie classification.
Manage banners across multiple sites at once. Integrate with website platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and others, without sacrificing site speed.
If other vendors give you a map to compliance, Osano gives you the map, compass, and comes along for the journey. Our platform bakes in regulatory best practices, provides free access to privacy experts and support, and backs it up with a “No Fines, No Penalties” Guarantee.
Receive a fine as a result of the Osano platform? We’ll pay a maximum of $500k. Learn about our guarantee.
Got a privacy question? Ask our privacy team. You could save $5,000 to $20,000 on legal fees per jurisdiction.
The best (and easiest) thing you can do in privacy is clearly demonstrate compliance to regulators, consumers, and the world on your web site and mobile apps. Osano Cookie Consent shows that you take data privacy seriously and put consumer rights first.
Allow users to control their cookie preferences with ease and without dark patterns.
Automatically generate and store records of user consent and consent changes.
In-app dashboards and reporting spotlight risk areas and uncover trends by platform, region, consent type, and more.
Discover actionable privacy & compliance tips straight from our team of legal and privacy experts through our blogs, webinars, ebooks, guides, and more.
About Lattice is a leading people management platform empowering high-performing...
Read nowUnderstanding cookies and consent management is an important step to becoming...
Read nowToday, multiple data privacy laws regulate millions of businesses and protect the...
Read nowAll Osanians work hard to ensure our customers have a delightful experience and stay compliant. Hear their reports on what it’s like to be an Osano customer.
"The Osano team is very knowledgeable, helpful, and accessible. I know I can expect a thoughtful and prompt response to all my questions. The platform is intuitive, easy to implement, and enables us to holistically monitor privacy compliance. We really could not be happier."
Ivanna C
G2 Reviewer
"Osano helped us get into cookie compliance in a customer-friendly and consistent manner. Looking forward to spending less time worrying about keeping up with legal changes with Osano looking out for the many coming changes in data compliance."
Aaron L
G2 Reviewer
"Osano is simplifying our international expansion and giving our exec team peace of mind with privacy compliance. It also has allowed us to conserve developer resources with its "one line JS" model."
Ryan W
CEO, G2 Reviewer
"The platform is highly intuitive, and the team has extensive legal knowledge of privacy regulations. Everything in the platform is set up for easy completion; you hardly need to contact the team for questions."
Lilla M
Digital Marketing Manager, G2 Reviewer
"We like that [Osano] is an all-in-one solution and that it automatically searches our site to keep us compliant."
Glen B
Director of Compliance and Commissions, G2 Reviewer
"It is hard to keep track of third-party cookies in an enterprise where several departments can add cookies. Osano helps take that back under control."
Martin V
Information Security Officer and Software Quality Manager, G2 Review
With Osano, getting and staying compliant becomes simple. Schedule a demo or try a free 30-day trial today.
Sign up for a demo today
Schedule a demoCreating a business and its corresponding online presence is a lot of responsibility. It can take a lot of time, research, management, and monitoring to ensure you’re doing your due diligence to protect your customers and your business from allegations of privacy violations. These days, managing cookie consent is the number one task businesses need to worry about when it comes to protecting their customers, obeying the law, and preserving their reputation.
Let’s quickly walk through four of the most frequently asked questions about cookie consent.
Cookies are small text files stored on a user’s browser that track and collect data such as their name, geographical location, IP address, and more. They can also track which web pages the user visited and how long they spent on the site.
Cookies are often used for marketing purposes and enable businesses to gain data on the sort of people their customers are. They’re a great tool for reaching your target market—but it’s important to use them correctly, or you could find yourself on the wrong side of the law.
When you visit a new website, you might see a banner pop up at the bottom of your screen with a cookie notice to accept or reject cookies or customize the type of cookies you do accept. The act of accepting cookies is cookie consent.
But it’s more complicated than just that. For instance, there is opt-in consent and opt-out consent. In the former case, you have to actually click “accept” and opt into the use of cookies before they can load on your browser. In the latter case, the banner might inform you that cookies are active and provide a link to stop them from tracking you—you have to opt out in this case.
Different laws require different kinds of cookie consent, which we’ll get into later on in the article.
In the EU, the ePrivacy directive (also called the Cookie Law) protects communications online. However, before the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), there were no cookie consent laws in the United States. There still aren’t any laws at the federal level, though several other states now feature regulations to protect data privacy. Most will be familiar with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Many other countries and regions are also beginning to pass similar laws.
If your website uses cookies, the short answer is yes, you need a cookie policy. Even if your business isn’t physically located in a jurisdiction covered by a cookie consent law, you may still receive web traffic from those regions and process the personal data of people protected by such a law. While you can tailor your cookie notices to only appear to residents within a given location, asking for cookie consent from all of your website visitors is a best practice.
One of the requirements under the GDPR (and most other data privacy laws) is that consent must be freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous. Specifically, this also means that to be compliant, website visitors must opt in before you can drop cookies onto their browser. That’s in contrast to opt-out laws, where cookies can be loaded until the user says otherwise.
Many businesses use an opt-out model when permitted by their governing law since some visitors default to rejecting or exiting cookie banners without indicating their preference. The CPRA is an example of a law that allows businesses to do this.
The CPRA’s cookie consent requirements are a little different. While the CPRA does not expressly require that a company use opt-in consent, it does require companies to disclose that cookies are being used and what the information gathered will be used for. Under the CPRA and other data privacy laws, data collected by cookies is considered personal information. The CPRA gives California residents the right to request access or deletion of their personal information, including data collected by cookies.
The basic requirements across the various laws are to first disclose that your website uses cookies, how you use them, and what rights visitors. This can be done with a pop-up notice or a banner at the bottom of the website.
A cookie consent manager uses banners or popups to collect consent, provide privacy disclosures, and meet other legal requirements. Some consumers have also started using universal preference signals, like the global privacy control, but most users still expect to indicate their consent on a cookie popup. Many laws require you to accept consent through both avenues to be compliant.
As described previously, opt-in and opt-out cookie consent popups are the two main approaches to cookie consent. There are also notice-only cookie banners, which inform the visitor that the website uses cookies but doesn’t provide any mechanism for opting into or out of their use. The only choices a user has with a notice-only banner is to disable cookies entirely in their browser or leave the website. These banners, however, are increasingly uncommon and are not compliant with most modern data privacy laws.
Not every website does cookie consent in the same way. As we mentioned, there are three different kinds of consent (opt-in, opt-out, and notice-only), and not all forms of consent align with data privacy laws.
Other regional requirements may also exist. For example, Brazil, Canada, U.S. states, and other jurisdictions all have privacy laws with different requirements for cookie consent. Some tools make it simple for businesses to properly display the appropriate cookie consent banners based on the user’s location—but what do those banners actually look like?
Let’s look at an example from Osano. We use the Osano Consent Management Platform (CMP) to manage cookies on our website. Osano CMP automatically detects where a visitor is located and delivers the corresponding banner, so if a visitor comes from an opt-out jurisdiction, a banner would appear stating that “This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. By remaining on this website, you indicate your consent.” The banner then links to our cookie policy.
Our policy provides clear instructions on how visitors can turn off or customize their cookies, which is accomplished by clicking the Osano Cookie Consent Tool icon in the lower left-hand of the visitors’ screen (if they’re visiting a website that uses Osano to manage consent).
Users are then presented with toggles to accept or reject marketing, personalization, analytics cookies, and an option to opt out of the sale or share personal information for targeted advertising (not pictured here).
If a visitor were to come to osano.com from a jurisdiction that is subject to the GDPR, then the banner might look something like this:
Note that each country subject to this data privacy regulation has its own requirements for cookie banners.
Taking a look at cookie consent examples from other businesses may give you an idea of what sort of banner you need to display on your website.
The Osano cookie banner shown above serves as a good GDPR cookie consent example, the requirements of which dictate that an organization must:
Cookie consent must be freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous. That is the direct language from the regulation's Article 4.
It is also common to include a link to your cookie policy that includes greater detail about the cookies your website uses. This is a great place to provide more information about cookie customization and let your users know what they are giving up when they decline unnecessary cookies such as marketing or analytics cookies.
A cookie consent manager is a software tool that helps businesses secure cookie consent from website visitors, manage cookies based on the visitor’s consent preferences, and record that consent. Osano serves as an example of this class of solutions—websites running Osano automatically deploy a cookie consent banner that complies with the visitor’s local data privacy law and language preference.
A management tool for cookie consent can be a major asset to a business seeking to remain compliant with ever-changing data privacy laws. There can be hefty fines for noncompliance. For example, Amazon was issued an $877 million fine in 2021 for GDPR violations. Most organizations won’t accrue violations at the same rate as Amazon, but fines can still be an existential threat to a growing business.
Rather than use a consent manager, some businesses opt for GDPR cookie consent plugins for WordPress or similar plugins for web tools. The trouble is that these plugins often offer bare-bones compliance. They often provide a one-size-fits-all cookie consent popup that is either excessively strict (causing you to lose out on value business intelligence) or too permissive (leaving you noncompliant in many jurisdictions).
Such plugins also lack many ancillary benefits that simplify the process. The Osano cookie consent manager, for instance, also provides cookie policy templates that are easy to tailor to your business—other approaches to cookie law compliance force you to develop those policies from scratch.
Rather than rely on plugins or subpar solutions, businesses should keep an eye out for solutions that:
Cookie consent management is a complicated topic, and we can explore only so much in a blog post. There are other questions to answer, like:
We explore these and other questions in our free ebook, Cookie Consent Management FAQ. You can download a copy here. If you're curious to learn more about data privacy software in general, just schedule a demo with our product experts
Osano makes it easy. Ready to get serious about data privacy? Fill out the form to schedule a demo with one of our product experts.