Do Cookie Banners Respect my Choice? Measuring Legal Compliance of Banners from IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework

11/22/2019
by   Célestin Matte, et al.
0

As a result of the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, European users encounter cookie banners on almost every website. Many of such banners are implemented by Consent Management Providers (CMPs), who respect the IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF). Via cookie banners, CMPs collect and disseminate user consent to third parties. In this work, we systematically study IAB Europe's TCF and analyze consent stored behind the user interface of TCF cookie banners. We analyze the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive to identify legal violations in implementations of cookie banners based on the storage of consent and detect such violations by crawling 22 949 European websites. With two automatic and semi-automatic crawl campaigns, we detect violations, and we find that: 175 websites register positive consent even if the user has not made their choice; 236 websites nudge the users towards accepting consent by pre-selecting options; and 39 websites store a positive consent even if the user has explicitly opted out. Performing extensive tests on 560 websites, we find at least one violation in 54 extension to facilitate manual detection of violations for regular users and Data Protection Authorities.

READ FULL TEXT

page 2

page 6

page 9

page 11

page 17

page 18

research
09/20/2023

Legitimate Interest is the New Consent – Large-Scale Measurement and Legal Compliance of IAB TCF Paywalls

Cookie paywalls allow visitors of a website to access its content only a...
research
04/19/2018

A spark is enough in a straw world: a study of websites password management in the wild

With the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDP...
research
04/14/2021

Consent Management Platforms under the GDPR: processors and/or controllers?

Consent Management Providers (CMPs) provide consent pop-ups that are emb...
research
02/02/2022

Opted Out, Yet Tracked: Are Regulations Enough to Protect Your Privacy?

Data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, require websites and...
research
10/06/2021

Cookie Banners, What's the Purpose? Analyzing Cookie Banner Text Through a Legal Lens

A cookie banner pops up when a user visits a website for the first time,...
research
08/27/2019

Multiple Purposes, Multiple Problems: A User Study of Consent Dialogs after GDPR

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset