Why the consent banner has no switch for “Functional” cookies.

WP FP distinguishes 3 types of uses of personal data – for statistics, marketing and personalization purposes.

Statistics and Marketing uses are obvious. Personalization is mainly for using visitors’ data by conversion optimization tools and tools that automatically adjust the content to better suit users.

We don’t have the “switch” for functional cookies, because “functional” does not represent any purpose of data use, and we basically consider it a way to hide from the user what their data will be used for.

In other CMP platforms, consent to functional cookies often enables embedded content like maps, forms and videos. However, this is misleading.

Depending on the platform that this content comes from, it may use visitors’ data for different things and may or may not require any consents.

For example, a YouTube video collects data for marketing purposes, and so, it requires this consent. However, if you host the same video yourself, on your server, you can show it on the page without any consents.

The same goes with maps and forms. If you embed a map from Google, then it will collect data for marketing purposes. If you get it from OpenStreetMap then you can show it without consent.