I would suspect this is an intentional dark pattern. They’re probably hoping most people will get tired of waiting and click cancel, which sets it back to the default of allowing all cookies.

Well, optimistically I’d say shitty web stuff, in the current climate I postulate also a little time-out for you to properly hit cancel out of frustration.

Unfortunately, it’s definitively an instance of intentional design. This whole consent dialog thing became a booming “consent management platform” industry. Many of them advertise better acceptance rates than the competition, or used to but have removed those claims in more recent times now that the big GDPR boom is over.

This particular dialog is TrustArc, who are infamous. At one point they defended it with a “well, we gotta retry if it fails to make sure your preference is expected, and we can’t know if your adblocker is causing it to fail or if it’s just a fluke”, which is one of those things where they say something that’s not totally wrong but you know they’re lying through their teeth.

Probably a fake progress ui.

I suspect it completes almost instantly if you agree to it tho ?

Usually, your consent is a simple yes/no flag, no and saving that in a cookie is enough.

I have seen this “processing” before. My assumption was that it sets cookies on third parties websites instead of only the one you visit. The basis for that assumption being that some ad network and tracker websites have/offer “opt out cookies”.

I haven’t checked whether that’s actually the case.

There is no other reasonably valid explanation for it. Setting a few cookies doesn’t take that much time. It would then be either intentionally slow and lying to you, or has horrendous unacceptable implementation (which could be seen as unlikely given how obviously customer facing it is).

Could you link the website?

It might help with diagnosing what happens, using the dev console

• track what is sent / received when the button is clicked
• see what third party service they are outsourcing to

It’s to let you know you should install an extension on your browser that adds a small “block this site” button to your search results

Use this and you won’t see it.

I personally use consent-o-matic and never even see these popups anymore

Excluding any dark pattern shenanigans from Frito Lay, the probable answer is that IT systems for large companies are a massive iceberg/rats nest.

The website you see is probably half a dozen different systems wearing a trenchcoat - the news section is probably a different piece of software to the “our products” section and a different piece again to the “contact us”. It’s not inconceivable that this site might be pulling data from 4 different backends and pushing analytics and behaviour data to 10 different systems run by 4 different companies and actually genuinely have to spend a few seconds querying different places to figure out if you’ve opted out anywhere

I’ve seen a website process literally over a thousand third-party cookies before, so maybe this one also just has that many to churn through

I thought this would be about a website that helps you bake the perfect cookie.