Deceptive Patterns
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Automated evaluation of cookie consent and GDPR compliance in educational websites

Author
Mu'awya Al-Dala'ien, Yousef Jarbou, Sana Mourad, Ayah AlJabali, Qasem Abu Al-Haija
Date
14 May 2026
Publisher
PeerJ Computer Science
Focus
Privacy & Data Protection
Category
Academic Scholar

An automated solution, an open-source tool, has been developed to evaluate the cookie consent mechanism, and compliance assessment has been systematically carried out across thousands of educational websites for compliance with GDPR.

Privacy is one of the biggest concerns for netizens, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides the stepping stone for privacy protection. Yet, many global organizations fail to demonstrate compliance, and numerous websites lack a GDPR-validated cookie consent mechanism, leading to potential data privacy breaches. Such loopholes diminish user trust and transparency, harming an organization’s credibility. The ultimate consequence is incurring penalties and damaging the organization’s reputation. This research primarily focuses on assessing education sector websites for compliance with GDPR. In this study, an automated solution, an open-source tool, has been developed to evaluate the cookie consent mechanism, and compliance assessment has been systematically carried out in this study across thousands of educational websites.