About
Consent is widely implemented and rarely verified.
Almost every website has a banner. Very few have ever tested what happens after someone presses refuse — and that is the only test that says whether any of it works.
The problem
The banner and the behaviour drift apart.
A site is configured correctly in March. In April a campaign adds a pixel through the tag manager. In May a plugin update brings its own analytics. In June a developer adds a video embed. Nothing on the site announces any of this, the banner still looks right, and the refusal path has not been tested since it was built.
The interesting question is never “do you have a cookie banner”. It is “what runs before anyone answers it, and what still runs after they say no”.
The approach
Discover, control and keep checking.
DotCensus discovers cookies and tracking technologies, collects visitor choices, controls what may run, sends privacy signals to connected platforms and continuously verifies your implementation.
And because a platform that generates websites knows what it inserted, the same engine can compile consent into a site at build time instead of discovering it afterwards. That is the second half of the plan, and the part that is genuinely different.
How we build it
Six principles that settle the arguments.
Written down because they come up repeatedly, usually when there is commercial pressure to bend one of them.
- 01
Say what is true today
Every module and integration carries its real state — available, beta, planned or certification pending — and the standards page is the thing we update, not the marketing copy. A privacy vendor caught overstating its own status has lost the only thing it sells.
- 02
Enforcement over appearance
A banner that looks correct while the pixel fires is worse than no banner, because it documents the problem. The product is built around what actually executes, which is why verification is a module rather than a feature.
- 03
Collect as little as possible
A consent platform sees every visitor to every customer site. That is exactly the wrong place to accumulate a tracking asset, so the receipt is pseudonymous, there is no visitor profile, and raw addresses are not retained by default.
- 04
Adapters, not entanglement
External standards move on their own schedule. Keeping one internal consent model behind versioned adapters means a framework changing is our upgrade, not your migration.
- 05
No legal advice
Software cannot tell you what the law requires of your business. It can tell you what your website does, hold the things you decided should be held, and keep evidence you can hand to someone qualified to judge it.
- 06
Dogfood it
dotcensus.com will run DotCensus, with its manifest published and its Privacy Health results visible. A consent product whose own site fails its own tests is not a product, it is an argument.
Know what runs before you ask visitors to trust it.
Start with a scan of what your website loads today. The list is usually longer than the team expects, and that is the useful part.
No code to install for a scan Public pages only DotCensus runs on DotCensus