Automated Tool Flags Widespread Consent Violations Across Thousands of Web Forms

Global: Automated Tool Flags Widespread Consent Violations Across Thousands of Web Forms

A new study introduces Cosmic, an automated framework designed to detect privacy‑related consent violations in web forms, and reports its application to 5,823 websites encompassing 3,598 distinct forms.

Regulatory Context

Legal standards such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require that user consent be informed, freely given, specific, and unambiguous, placing a duty on website operators to implement transparent mechanisms.

Research Gap

Prior investigations have largely concentrated on cookie banners and mobile app dialogs, leaving a substantial portion of consent‑related interactions embedded in functional web forms under‑examined.

The Cosmic Framework

Cosmic employs machine‑learning classifiers and heuristic rules to locate consent fields, interpret their legal basis, and assess compliance with key GDPR principles, including the availability of withdrawal options and purpose disclosure.

Evaluation Results

When deployed across the sampled sites, Cosmic identified 3,384 violations on 94.1% of the consent forms examined. The system achieved true positive rates of 98.6% for detecting consent elements and 99.1% for flagging violations, indicating high accuracy.

Implications for Compliance

The findings suggest that automated auditing can uncover pervasive shortcomings in consent implementation, offering regulators and organizations a scalable method to monitor adherence to data‑protection mandates.

Future Directions

Researchers propose extending the framework to cover additional jurisdictions and to integrate real‑time monitoring capabilities, aiming to further bridge the gap between legal expectations and actual practice.

This report is based on information from arXiv, licensed under Academic Preprint / Open Access. Based on the abstract of the research paper. Full text available via ArXiv.