Kill the Cookie Banner

You visit websites. You get cookie/consent banners you must fight through. They contain dark patterns and other manipulative/bad practices. You accidentally allow 1000s of companies to track you across the web and infer intimate details about your health, sexuality, ideology, and more. The EU Commission proposed a simple technical solution for this – let a (browser) agent take your preferences and then manage these automatically for you. However, regulators and lawmakers are not acting (fast enough) to accept this because they are uncertain whether a technical solution is feasible and will work in real-world conditions. The student will assist with the ongoing https://killthecookiebanner.eu/ initiative by: (1) Helping consolidate existing literature on problems and solutions, including scoring them based on e.g. maturity; (2) Develop a technical prototype that simulates different actors (both good and bad) to create a comprehensive report on how it will function, how it can be audited, and what problems would still remain. The student will assist ongoing research and activities regarding lawmaking and policy activities, which means that the objective is not to produce a ‘toy project’ by themselves but to assess existing solutions by companies, features in existing browsers, standards. See https://w3id.org/dpv/standards/ieee/7012 and https://www.dataprotectioncontrol.org/spec/ and https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.05786 and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2026.106332 for context.