Nothing on our landing page talks to another domain, which is why there is no cookie banner

Opening pub-trivia.app reveals no cookie consent dialog. This is not a task to overcome or a risk someone chose to accept. Instead, it is a consequence of a loading decision that can be traced through three commands on your own machine. Using curl to inspect the site's resources in three ways - looking for scripts, stylesheets, images, and links - yields no external references.

A first visit sets no cookies, and a browser inspection confirms an empty cookie list. The banner's origin lies outside our control. Under UK PECR, cookies not strictly necessary for the user's requested service require consent, including analytics and advertising cookies. However, cookies for maintaining user sessions do not need consent.

Each third-party addition brings additional responsibilities in terms of cookie policies, consent states, blocking until consent, and user-facing dialogs. The absence of analytics, hosted fonts, chat widgets, and social buttons eliminates potential privacy and performance concerns. The site sets authentication cookies for user login and fraud prevention cookies for payment pages, both of which are strictly necessary.

Error monitoring operates without third-party requests, adding no additional tracking. While lacking analytics, the decision comes down to balancing the lack of data with the scale of the site and the most critical pages. The cookie policy remains concise due to the minimal number of requests made. The takeaway emphasizes the importance of determining what a site allows to load before deciding on consent requirements.

The cheapest solution often involves avoiding the need for consent infrastructure altogether, and the price is making certain trade-offs.