← InsightsBriefingPrivacyJAN 2026 · 7 MIN

Consent Governance in the Age of AI

Why consent management is becoming a data-use control, not just a cookie banner.

Lena Hofmann
Privacy · Briefing
In this piece

The argument at a glance.

Why consent management is becoming a data-use control, not just a cookie banner.

01From banners to controls
02What changes with AI

Consent has evolved beyond cookie banners and email opt-ins. In the AI era, consent governance determines whether personal data can be used for training, inference, profiling, automated decisioning, and cross-border transfer.

From banners to controls

Modern consent governance answers a specific question: can this person's data be used for this purpose, in this region, through this channel, under current consent and preference rules? The answer must be fast, auditable, and defensible.

What changes with AI

AI creates new consent scenarios that most consent platforms were not built to handle. Training data consent, inference-time consent, sensitive attribute consent, and cross-border processing consent all require purpose-level granularity.

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