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In new work, Dr Michael Veale (Lecturer in Digital Rights and Regulation at听), alongside colleagues from Aarhus University (Midas Nouwens) and MIT (Ilaria Liccardi, David Karger, Lalana Kagal), built a web scraper to automatically analyse the 10,000 most popular websites in the United Kingdom for how their user interface complied with the and the . They found that among the largest providers of third-party consent management systems 鈥� so-called 鈥榗ookie banner鈥� or 鈥榩op-ups鈥� 鈥� only 11.8% were configured in minimal compliance with existing statutory requirements and case law.

In a BBC News article published today (''), Dr Veale commented:

"Consent should always have been a clear positive action, laws on tracking have been unenforced for a decade and the result is regulators not knowing where to start to cope with the scale of the widespread illegality."听

Their work has also been , where Dr Veale noted:

鈥淚t鈥檚 shocking to see how many of the large providers of consent pop-ups allow their systems to be misconfigured, such as through implicit consent, in ways that clearly infringe data protection law [..] I suspect data protection authorities see this widespread illegality and are not sure exactly where to start. Yet if they do not start enforcing these guidelines, it鈥檚 unclear when this widespread illegality will start to stop.鈥�

He added in comments to the magazine that 鈥淭his study even overestimates compliance, as we don鈥檛 focus on what actually happens to the tracking when you click on these buttons, which have emphasised in many cases mislead individuals and do nothing at all鈥�.

The research article is available now in and will appear in the Proceedings of ACM CHI 2020, the top publication in human-computer interaction, later in the year.