Papers › A Cross-Country Analysis of GDPR Cookie Banners and Flexible Methods for Scraping Them
A Cross-Country Analysis of GDPR Cookie Banners and Flexible Methods for Scraping Them
Midas Nouwens, Janus Bager Kristensen, Kristjan Maalt, Rolf Bagge
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Online tracking remains problematic, with compliance and ethical issues persisting despite regulatory efforts. Consent interfaces, the visible manifestation of this industry, have seen significant attention over the years. We present robust automated methods to study the presence, design, and third-party suppliers of consent interfaces at scale and the web service consent-observatory.eu to do it with. We examine the top 10,000 websites across 31 countries under the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR (n=254.148). Our findings show that 67% of websites use consent interfaces, but only 15% are minimally compliant, mostly because they lack a reject option. Consent management platforms (CMPs) are powerful intermediaries in this space: 67% of interfaces are provided by CMPs, and three organisations hold 37% of the market. There is little evidence that regulators' guidance and fines have impacted compliance rates, but 18% of compliance variance is explained by CMPs. Researchers should take an infrastructural perspective on online tracking and study the factual control of intermediaries to identify effective leverage points.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections