Informed consent is not a cookie modal
Most digital products treat consent as a legal barrier to get around, not as a commitment to the user. That's a product problem, not a legal one.
A few weeks ago I tried to reject cookies on a website. It took me over a minute to find the button.
It wasn’t hidden by a bug. There was a banner covering half the screen, two large blue buttons: “Accept all” and “Customize”. And a light gray link in smaller font, nearly invisible against the white background: “Reject non-essential.” It required deliberate effort to find. That struck me as strange.
I looked more closely. Legally, it was correct. Brazil’s LGPD doesn’t require buttons to be the same size or color. It requires that the user have the option. The option was there.
But that wasn’t consent. It was a product whose success depended on you not exercising your right.
Why do we accept “having the option” as enough? Medicine wouldn’t. Informed consent has specific criteria: the patient needs to understand what they’re agreeing to, the available alternatives, the consequences of each choice. Not just receive the information. Actually comprehend it. Those are different things.
Digital product has never taken this seriously. The product version of “informed consent” is a 3,000-word document nobody will read followed by an “Accept” button. The legal team signs off. The product team moves on.
“Consent that requires effort to deny is not consent. It’s pressure with a friendly interface.”
When the business model depends on behavioral data, genuine consent is adversarial to the business. You can’t simultaneously maximize opt-in and ensure the user actually understood what they’re giving up. These goals conflict.
Most teams resolve this conflict silently in favor of the business and call it a “UX decision.”
That’s a decision with ethical consequences. It deserves to be treated as such.
I’m not sure there’s a clean way out. Maybe there isn’t. But I think it starts by naming the trade-off internally, instead of outsourcing it to legal and moving on. Teams that have never had that conversation are making an ethical decision without realizing they’re making one.