A recognised consent management service lets users store their decisions about cookies and tracking in one central place instead of making them on every website's cookie banner. Internationally, such services are called Personal Information Management Systems, or PIMS.
Legal basis in Germany
Section 26 of the German TDDDG allows such services to be officially recognised. The details are set out in the Consent Management Ordinance (Einwilligungsverwaltungsverordnung, EinwV), in force since 1 April 2025. Recognition is handled by the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI).
Among other things, a recognised service must be independent, must have no commercial interest in the consents and must store users' decisions in a traceable way.
Consenter: the first recognised service
With effect from 17 October 2025, the BfDI recognised Consenter as the first service under the EinwV. The official launch followed in late January 2026, initially as a Chrome extension. Users can set which purposes they generally agree or object to.
Why the cookie banner stays
The catch: website operators are not obliged to adopt decisions from a recognised service. As long as this is voluntary, few websites use the stored settings, and the cookie banner remains mandatory for advertisers.
Link to the Digital Omnibus
The idea of central consent signals is also being debated at EU level. The European Commission's Digital Omnibus proposal of November 2025 included a new Art. 88b GDPR requiring websites to respect machine-readable signals from the browser. The Council deleted this article in its compromise text of June 2026. There was no agreement on the Omnibus by mid-October 2026, so whether binding browser signals will come remains open.