The cookie banner tax
Consent was supposed to give the reader a choice. In practice it has given us a toll-booth on every page.
Lead column
№ 03
21 July 2026
The update that took the feature away
Every other month a familiar app arrives new, polished, and oddly smaller. The button has moved. The bit you relied on has gone away for your own good.
The patch notes are poetry. Performance improvements. Minor bug fixes. A delicate line about how the team has been listening. You update, because you have been asked politely twenty times and the little red dot has started to feel personal, and the app opens looking like itself. Then you try to do the one thing you actually open the app t… Read the column →
This month’s columns
All columns →When a single rail fare needs six taps
Buying a train ticket in Britain is a short exam, and the answer you give decides how much you pay for sitting on the same seat.
Everyone owns a parking app now
A council car park used to want pound coins. Now it wants your mobile number, your postcode, and a small monthly surcharge.
The honest case against chat with us
The widget says "Hi! I'm here to help." It is not here to help. It is here to delay you until you give up.
Receipts the length of my arm
The receipt is an ecosystem. It has a title, a loyalty tier, an invitation to rate us, a QR code, and, somewhere near the end, what you bought.
From the letters page
“Please keep writing about the receipts. My pockets cannot take another winter.” A reader, Durham