Well... turns out, it's not that easy. I, too, removed the cookies from my website [1] and was thrilled to finally get rid of the cookie banner, but had to jump through some hoops:
- It's a WooCommerce store. WooCommerce stores one persistent cookie to keep track of your cart. I had to hack up a little snippet of PHP code to turn that into a session cookie. It's not quite documented behavior, but the hack feels robust enough that I can live with it. (Sessions cookies are allowed, as per GDPR.)
- YouTube embeds had to go, as even their youtube-nocookie domain sets cookies (thanks, YT). Vimeo has a "dnt" option that seems close to what I want, but it still sets some ID in localStorage, which the GDPR views as equivalent to cookies in this regard. So my current workaround is to just have the video thumbnail and link to the proper video on YT, but that sucks because now my visitors leave the website.
- Replaced Google Analytics with self-hosted Matomo, carefully configured to not set cookies (it's not trivial), which now regularly brings my cheap hosted server to the limit ;-)
So even a relatively simple website that does little fancy is not easy to get free of cookies.
Would you have a source? Reading through this page[0] I don't get the impression this is right. Session cookies are cookies nonetheless that can be used to identify users and if they are used that way, consent should be asked and given before usage.
- It's a WooCommerce store. WooCommerce stores one persistent cookie to keep track of your cart. I had to hack up a little snippet of PHP code to turn that into a session cookie. It's not quite documented behavior, but the hack feels robust enough that I can live with it. (Sessions cookies are allowed, as per GDPR.)
- YouTube embeds had to go, as even their youtube-nocookie domain sets cookies (thanks, YT). Vimeo has a "dnt" option that seems close to what I want, but it still sets some ID in localStorage, which the GDPR views as equivalent to cookies in this regard. So my current workaround is to just have the video thumbnail and link to the proper video on YT, but that sucks because now my visitors leave the website.
- Replaced Google Analytics with self-hosted Matomo, carefully configured to not set cookies (it's not trivial), which now regularly brings my cheap hosted server to the limit ;-)
So even a relatively simple website that does little fancy is not easy to get free of cookies.
[1] https://dascask.com