CookieBlock

Cookie banners often provide the user with a selection of different usage categories that one can consent towards. But how can we be sure that websites really respect these choices? And what should one do about websites that do not offer consent choices?

With CookieBlock, the user is able to specify consent preferences once for all websites he or she visits. The extension automatically assigns usage categories to observed cookies, using a tree model trained with XGBoost, and automatically deletes cookies that the user did not agree to. This way, the user can enforce his or her preferences, regardless of whether the website respects the consent choices.

After installing the extension, simply specify your preferences in the setup, and whether you would like CookieBlock to collect a history of cookies. This history is optional, but it can help improve the performance by remembering recent categorizations, and improve the classification accuracy.

This add-on has been built by members of the Information Security Group of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zürich, and was developed as part of the master thesis "Analyzing Cookies Compliance with the GDPR" .

The source code for CookieBlock, as well as additional related repositories for the extension can be found at: https://github.com/dibollinger