Browsers that have already refused

A browser sending Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track has answered. Several jurisdictions now treat GPC as a legally valid refusal.

With that setting on — it is, by default — those visitors are not shown the banner at all. The refusal is stored as their answer, and nothing optional runs. Showing them a banner and then acting on the banner would be asking a question you already had the answer to.

The signal is read by each visitor's own browser, not by the server. Your pages are cached, and a server that wrote the answer into the page would hand one visitor's signal to everybody who read that copy after them.

Showing that it was honoured. Such a visitor can still open the choices, from the Cookie choices button or a link made with [cookie_choices]. The choices then say, in one line under the banner's words, that their browser's privacy signal was honoured and nothing optional is switched on, so they can see the signal was processed, which California's rules have expected of a site since 1 January 2026. The line is shown only while that refusal is the answer in force: once they agree to something in the choices, their own answer counts, and the line is not shown again. Nobody else sees it. Its words are yours to change under The banner → Words.