Consent management and the consent dialog
What consent management means, what the consent dialog and preference center are for, and how a visitor's choices are stored and proven.
Consent management is the process of obtaining and managing a visitor's consent for the use of cookies and other tracking technologies on a website or app, and being able to show afterwards what was agreed. Laws such as the GDPR require consent before cookies that track a visitor or identify them are set, and require that consent can be withdrawn as easily as it was given.
The consent dialog
The consent dialog is what visitors see when they arrive: a message that tells them the website uses cookies and asks for their consent. It opens a preference center where the visitor can choose category by category and read the cookie declaration. Which action buttons the dialog shows, such as accepting all, rejecting what needs consent or opening the choices, is yours to set, and it can differ by region. How it looks, where it sits and what it says is set under Customization; on Basic plans and up it is available in 62 languages, chosen per visitor. See Languages.
Consent types
The consent type sets a visitor's initial consent state, before they have answered. It is configured for each region in the Dashboard:
- Explicit consent: nothing that needs consent is allowed until the visitor allows it. This is what the GDPR requires.
- Implied consent: everything is allowed from the start, until the visitor denies it. Some regions permit this.
Whether the consent dialog is shown at all can also be set per region, so a region with implied consent can show the dialog to inform, or not show it. See Regions and How regional framework rules work.
How choices are stored
A visitor's choices are stored in a first-party cookie on their device, named cookiehub by default and kept for a year. Its name, lifetime and Secure attribute are set under Consent storage. On each page the script reads the cookie and applies the choices, so the dialog is not shown again, and the preference center lets the visitor change them at any time; see Resurface dialog. The cookie's contents are described in Cookies and storage used by CookieHub.
When you change what the dialog asks, for example by adding a category or a vendor, you can ask every visitor again by resetting consents in the Dashboard: the domain's consent revision increases, and a visitor whose cookie carries an older revision sees the dialog again.
Proving consent
With the consent log enabled, each choice is recorded with the page, the time, an anonymized IP address and the visitor's consent token. The token is shown to the visitor under Your choices in the preference center, so a visitor who asks what they agreed to can be looked up by token, without CookieHub holding anything that identifies them. See Security and data protection practices.
Where to next
- Cookie categories: what visitors consent to.
- How CookieHub works on a page: the sequence from script load to stored choice.
- Supported privacy laws and Preconfigured settings.