Download Hush 1.0.10 (Mac) – Download Free

In order to comply with EU GDPR requirements, websites must inform users about the cookies they use and give them the option of which cookies should be activated. This means that when you first visit the website, you must view a consent form and submit your preferences.

hush is a Safari extension designed to make your browsing experience smoother by completely blocking these cookie pop-ups. Since non-essential cookies cannot be used without the user’s consent, this should be a good enough privacy solution.

Block cookie consent popups

It’s worth noting that this extension doesn’t interact with cookie popups in any way, so no options will be selected until they are closed. They’re just completely blocked from appearing. Under GDPR law, websites are not allowed to enable non-essential cookies without the user’s explicit consent, so ideally this should result in only necessary cookies being used.

Of course, this is not a perfect solution. Certain websites may still have some non-essential cookies enabled by default, even if this violates EU regulations. A more advanced approach would be to automatically select cookie preferences for maximum privacy, similar to what the DuckDuckGo browser does, but this would make the extension more complicated.

Doesn’t work on some popular sites

After trial, Hush seems to be able to block cookie pop-up windows of many websites, but many popular websites are not covered. For example, on Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, BBC, and Bing, consent forms still appear.

This might just be a temporary issue, but these are some pretty glaring oversights. It doesn’t help that reporting a website requires you to open a Google Docs form and manually submit the URL and question. In-browser reporting tools make things a lot easier.

In short, Hush may be a good extension for EU Safari users, but it seems to lack coverage for some of the most popular sites out there. It works fine on most of the other sites it’s been tested on, but obviously there are still some kinks to work out.