Hi MoMa88 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I'm not in your situation so I cannot know what would best serve the situation - but there is an earlier discussion here that does sort many such questions regarding GDPR, the new EEA and UK requirements and consent implementation, it might be useful to look through those questions and answers: [webmasterworld.com...]

I think that Google does not place any cookie on the website, but that the cookie is placed in the visitor's browser.

If you delete the cookie, you will receive the GDPR consent message again with the option of accepting or not. Try it by cleaning cache and cookies in your browser and visit website again. You wil be prompt again with consent message.

Then, for traffic outside the EU and the UK, the GDPR message does not appear. It is only for visitors from the EU and UK, as well as slightly modified for visitors from California.

So I just thought to myself that I would - via PHP - delete this cookie and then they would automatically get the message again.

the cookies are stored in the visitor's browser cache and there is nothing that you can do to affect cookies that are created by another domain.

Hello everyone and thank you for your answers. I fixed the problem and will get to that in a moment.

@not2easy - Thank you for that link. I read through it. but unfortunately, I didn't find it helpful. But I could tell that more people than myself had this problem.

@dolcevita - You are completely right and I wrote it wrong. I ment in fact that Google places a cookie in the visitors browser. I have a website with around 600.000 page views per month, so I was/is in a bad situation. The problem was that a lot of users did not accept the consent message. They denied and therefore as a result - no ads were shown to 60% of my users.

So it was not for me personally. I could manually delete the cookie and everything would be fine - FOR ME :) But I needed the other 60% to consent or at least a big part of the 60%. I would do this by deleting the cookie that Google AdSense placed on behalf of my website. But I see a LOT of problems in regards to this exact cookie. You can't delete it with PHP. But I did with javascript.

@phranque - Well Google AdSense actually places the cookie on behalf of the domain. So I should in theory be able to delete this exact cookie from my own website - correct? Apparently, it's waaay harder than one should think. I and many others can't make it work with PHP. With a bit of help from stackoverflow, I made a solution with JavaScript. Not the perfect solution but yet something that is better than nothing.

So the solution for anyone else:

<script>
var domainName = window.location.hostname;
document.cookie = "FCCDCF=...; expires=Tue, 16 Apr 2019 11:31:56 GMT; path=/; domain=." + domainName;
</script>

Now... the problem with this script is that it will keep asking the user for consent every single time a new page is introduced. That is a pain the the ass tbh. I fixed it like this:

- I noticed that whenever someone did consent, the value of the cookie would be a lot higher than when they didn't consent. Therefore I made a simple, simple, simple script that takes the value of the cookie and calculate the number of characters. So when the cookie value was low they would be introduced to the consent message. When the value was high - they wouldn't receive the consent message.

Full script (placed in header):

<?php
$CookieValue = $_COOKIE['FCCDCF'];

$CookieChar = strlen($CookieValue);

if($CookieChar < "600") {
?>
<script>
var domainName = window.location.hostname;
document.cookie = "FCCDCF=...; expires=Tue, 16 Apr 2019 11:31:56 GMT; path=/; domain=." + domainName;
</script>
<?php
}
?>

I've been going back and forth with Google Support on this for a couple weeks now. After multiple postings to the Google help forums I finally got a human from Google to contact me regarding this issue via email.

They gave me all of the same advice other users are giving you here, and none of it worked.

As of our last correspondence, the support representative finally seems to understand that this is an issue.

There is no amount of re-obtaining consent or un-publishing and re-publishing your GDPR message that will make this problem go away.

It looks increasingly like a bug.

Ignore anyone who tells you that there's a simple solution to this issue that you can perform from the AdSense control panel. That does not seem to be the case at all.

(I would also add, that this entire issue is somewhat bizzarre because if Google required visitor re-consent, they could very well ask for it themselves. The fact that this seems to require some form of webmaster input is in and of itself, very strange IMHO. )

Anyway.. I encourage anyone with this problem to hammer away on Google's help forums and make sure this problem is heard loudly and clearly.

If you're interested in "how" to re-obtain consent via the AdSense control panel to see this issue for yourself, the easiest way is to go to the GDPR settings and change any of the settings within the "Add Purposes for Your Own Use" settings. Once anything in that section is changed, you'll get a warning message popping up saying that this will require re-confirmation of all users -- do you want to continue? Say yes. And it will force re-confirmation for all your users.

Not that this will do anything. You'll still be stuck with the warning message.

@MoMa88
maybe an easier way would be to just turn off the GDPR banner completely (because it doesn't need to be switched on until january 2024), and then just put some php on your pages to check if the FCCDCF cookie exists, and then delete it. don't bother setting another one.
by the time january comes around most of them should be gone

@londrum
You are absolutely right! I was so caught up in the problem, that I didn't realize that I could just delete the cookie without asking for consent again. That's done now. Thank you.

[edited by: MoMa88 at 2:49 pm (utc) on Sep 15, 2023]

@Senechal

Thank you for your message. I agree that Google is shooting themselves in the foot. They could have done this way better. A billion-dollar TECH-company like Google should be able to make these things happen quite effortlessly.

Adsense is definitely broken recently, not only GDPR and also Policies as well but this GDPR content warnings/errors drive me crazy. I contacted a couple of times with Adsense support. They mostly don't reply and once someone replied but I had a feeling he doesn't even know what Adsense is. And he escalated to the technical team etc.. etc...

The only thing I'm worried because of this EU&UK GDPR error I'm losing some money.