Bots give consent, here's FouAnalytics data

Some humans don't like consent banners, ads and tracking so they don't give consent. But bots' job is to get ads to load, so they give consent to tracking and therefore ads. That means, even if you have consent, it doesn't mean it's humans. Most advertisers didn't believe me when I told them, so here's the proof, shown in FouAnalytics data.

Here's the click data. Can you tell why these are bot clicks, and not human clicks, even if I took away the red color coding?

Here's what was clicked -- "onetrust-accept-btn-handler"

These silly bots rotated a list of HTTP_USER_AGENTS that declared all of them to be iPhone users. Oh, and I believe we're on iOS 16, 17, 18 now, right?

And note the clicks by the bots have no corresponding touch events. Have you tried clicking something on your smartphone without touching the screen? Yeah, it's really really hard.

OK, I'll keep this short, because the point is simple. Don't assume that because you got consent, it's humans. In fact, it's more likely that if you got consent, it's bots. Unfortunately, I have to break it to you, advertisers that were merrily serving ads to users "with consent" were unwittingly serving ads to the hoards of bots that gave consent, like the above.

Consent management platforms (CMPs) like OneTrust should really get better bot detection (and not count the consent given by bots as valid consent).

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