the product
Regions & regimes
A regime is the set of consent rules a visitor's country puts them under. CookieCrumbs looks up the country and applies the matching rules: which banner appears, what may be on by default, how long a choice lasts.
resolutionHow a visitor's rules are chosen
Four steps, first match wins, identical in the runtime and in the editor's preview:
- Forced regime: if you force one rule set for everyone (useful for testing, occasionally right in production), it wins.
- Country override: an explicit mapping you set for a specific country.
- Geography: the visitor's country, resolved server-side from the IP address against a country-level database, mapped to an enabled rule set. The IP is used for the lookup and not stored.
- Everyone else: visitors from countries no rule covers get the fallback you chose, EU opt-in by default because it is the strictest of the six.
Geolocation is country-level and honest about being so: it can be wrong at borders and behind VPNs. The strict fallback means a mistake errs towards asking more, not less.
the regimesThe six rule sets
| Regime | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| EU opt-in | EU and EEA, 30 countries | Nothing optional runs before consent; no category preticked except Necessary; Reject all beside Accept all. |
| UK PECR | United Kingdom | Opt-in like the EU. An optional statistical mode can start low-risk first-party analytics on, following the exemption line; the banner then must say so, and the lint checks it. |
| CH FADP | Switzerland | Swiss law allows an opt-out approach for some processing. Strict mode shows the EU banner; the allowance mode starts functional and analytics on with a clear way out. |
| BR LGPD | Brazil | Consent-based, in the visitor's terms; Brazilian Portuguese arrives translated. |
| CA-QC Law 25 | Canada, Quebec-aware | Consent with Quebec's confidentiality wording where required. |
| US opt-out | United States | Opt-out model: a do-not-sell-or-share control instead of a blocking wall, and the browser's Global Privacy Control signal is honoured automatically. |
Consent expiry is set per regime, capped at thirteen months (twelve under US opt-out). Refusals are remembered separately so a visitor who said no is not asked again the next day.
set-upChoosing without studying
The Regions screen asks one question: where are your visitors? Europe, Europe and the UK, or worldwide. The answer enables the right regimes, and the screen keeps stating the live result in one sentence, for example "EU opt-in for 30 countries, everyone else falls back to EU opt-in". The per-regime switches, expiries and country overrides all remain available under Advanced.
The Swiss, Brazilian and Canadian rule sets are part of the paid plans; the dashboard marks them with the plan that unlocks them.