This article summary is based on the research paper: 'CookieEnforcer: Automated Cookie Notice Analysis and Enforcement'

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A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google say they have discovered a way to use artificial intelligence to combat the pervasiveness of manipulative cookie consent pop-ups on the web. The project, dubbed CookieEnforcer, was announced this month to automate clicking options on these online consent forms to disable all non-essential cookies on a website. As a result, the resulting software can save Internet users from having to manually reject cookies presented by a website.

According to the project document, many users click “accept all” when faced with cookie pop-ups required by EU and other legislation, even though unnecessary cookies can compromise privacy. To discourage people from disabling tracking cookies, some organizations forced to implement these pop-ups have designed them to be difficult to navigate or use dark patterns to trick someone into selecting the opposite desired option. .

It’s such a problem that France fined Google and Facebook 200 million euros in January for the design of their pages, so refusing cookies was harder than accepting them.

The CookieEnforcer team has eliminated the need for users to wade through lengthy consent forms, saying it takes an average of 12 clicks to disable non-essential cookies. Since the layout of these forms varies from site to site, the software must be able to automatically detect and determine which controls to select. Rather than using previous methods that relied heavily on manual analysis and configuration, the team chose a machine learning model that is much more scalable for “breadth and depth of cookie notices “.

When one learns to successfully manipulate the cookie controls on a website, the software works in three steps: when one visits a web page, the trained software detects the location of the cookie notice; it then predicts the actions required to return commands to disable non-essential cookies; and finally, it does this by simulating user mouse clicks. CookieEnforcer does all of this in the background, “without interfering with the user experience”.

Google resumes transferring information to its European privacy sandbox watchdog: All user information collected through the ad consent pop-up system should be deleted. Cookie form detection is accomplished by solving the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task that converts cookie and website data with a few clicks that disable tracking cookies. Eventually, CookieEnforcer was packaged as a Chrome extension.

During testing, CookieEnforcer was found to be 91% effective at automatically disabling cookies on over 500 leading websites, according to Tranco. CookieEnforcer’s error rate was also relatively low, sources said: it was tested on 500 domains, 250 of which had cookie notices, 247 of which had cookie notices, and only one of them was fake. positive. A few domains were skipped due to unusual practices, such as placing the cookie notice in a single site element or automatically blocking automated tools.

If you want to try CookieEnforcer, you’re out of luck: it’s not yet publicly available. The research team said they were preparing the browser extension for general release, but did not specify a date. Refer to the article published by the researcher for more information.

Article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.04221.pdf

References:

• https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/12/cookie_consent_is_broken_and/
• https://thenextweb.com/news/cookieforcer-ai-browser-extension-can-kill-cookie-popups