On Chrome, how to change cookie setting after accept-all for a site?

Question

On Chrome, how to change cookie setting after accept-all for a site?

Clicked "Accept all" by mistake for a site. How to change it?

Answer 1

That entirely depends on website's implementation of cookie settings. There's no standard. Everything I specify below is respecting GDPR laws, which aren't too precise. And of course not all websites will follow them fully, especially not websites that aren't targetted at Europeans. There could be other similar local laws that make it even more loose or more strict. Or nothing and it's completely uncontrolled.

Most often you can just delete a cookie or a bunch of them to revert your decision. For example, SuperUser sets OptanonConsent and OptanonAlertBoxClosed cookies. Deleting the 2nd one, which contains a date for when you clicked "accept", seems to control whether the popup is shown and the website considers you are ok with cookies.

Some other sites could save it to local storage, some different ones to their own database if you're logged in.

And if GDPR is respected fully properly, there could also be a clear way to just withdraw your consent on the website. From my experience, it's not user-friendly and easily findable most of the time, though. For example, StackExchange sites have this in footer:

Clearing all data for a website is the safest way to go about it, but:

• you will lose some cookies or data that you might like to keep, like login data or some website configuration
• when you're accepting cookies on some website, you might also accept them for some 3rd party websites. In that case you'll need to repeat the process for each website that is likely specified in the website's ToS or just purge the whole browser.
• even above action doesn't cover mentioned case of website saving it in own DB, for that you have to look in website settings to make sure you haven't ticked some consent which is stated to be stored for the account regardless of the device.