Muhammad Abu Bakar Aziz and Christo Wilson, Northeastern University
Modern websites rely on a complex technical pipeline to obtain user consent: users interact with consent banners; consent management platforms (CMPs) encode their choices; scripts expose those consent signals via cookies, APIs, and IAB standards; and advertising systems are expected to read those consent signals and then honor them. In theory, this consent pipeline provides users with meaningful control over their data. In practice, it frequently fails.
In this talk, we present findings from multiple empirical privacy measurement studies—including our own large-scale analysis of opt-out enforcement—to identify common technical and design failure modes that lead to breakdowns in consent transmission. We show how user consent can be lost due to low adoption or misconfiguration of privacy standards and gaps between standardized frameworks and their deployments. We conclude with high-level suggestions to improve the reliability of consent mechanisms in practice.
Muhammad Abu Bakar Aziz is a final-year PhD candidate at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. His research focuses on web and data privacy. He builds large-scale web measurement systems to study privacy practices across online platforms and advertising ecosystems. His research has appeared at top-tier conferences such as PETS and WWW. He aims to apply his privacy research and engineering experience to build and improve privacy systems in industry.
Christo Wilson is a Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Professor Wilson's research covers a wide range of digital consumer protection topics using measurement-driven approaches. This includes areas like online tracking and privacy, deceptive dark pattern user interfaces, fairness and bias in machine learning, and empirical antitrust investigations of tech platforms.
author = {Muhammad Abu Bakar Aziz and Christo Wilson},
title = {Why Consent Fails in Practice: Lessons from Web Measurement Studies},
year = {2026},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun
}