Cookie consent choices are just being ignored by some websites

Research by the University of Amsterdam and ETH Zürich used machine learning to examine ~100,000 European websites and found pervasive cookie consent non-compliance: 90% violated at least one rule, 65% set tracking cookies even after refusal, and 77% treated closing banners as consent, often leveraging dark patterns; regulators like France’s CNIL have issued numerous corrective measures, underscoring systemic privacy issues rather than a discrete security incident.