Access and continuity
The evidence that a specific person agreed to a specific thing at a specific time — which is what an authority asks for, rather than the tick box that produced it.
Also called Proof of consent · Consent log · Запись согласия · Доказательство согласия
A tick box with no log is the same as no consent when it is examined. What has to survive is the record: who, what they were shown, when, and through which control — because the question is never whether a checkbox existed but whether a person can be shown to have chosen.
Two design decisions destroy a record without anyone noticing. Dismissal treated as agreement makes closing a dialogue indistinguishable from consenting to it, so the log records an event that describes nothing the person decided. And asymmetric persistence — a yes written to storage while a no is held in memory — means the record only ever accumulates agreements.
In the UAE, marketing consent is the place this bites hardest today. Data Nexus could not identify a UAE requirement to obtain consent for cookies in the form the European rule imposes, and states that as an absence rather than a permission.
Most systems store a boolean. What is asked for is the version of the notice shown, the timestamp, the mechanism and the identifier — and reconstructing those after the fact from a database that only holds true is not possible.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.