Testing cookie behavior across hundreds of web surfaces with our in-house auditor

As AI and automation become a bigger part of digital experiences, it’s increasingly important that people stay in control of the choices they make. They should be able to benefit from new technology without losing the preferences they’ve already expressed.

Cookie banners are one of the most familiar places where people express those preferences online. They’re also one of the most visible parts of a company’s privacy program. And for companies that operate a large, dynamic collection of websites, keeping them working as intended can be challenging. A banner might work correctly when a page launches, but changes made later can affect how someone’s cookie preferences are saved or applied. When someone accepts, declines, or customizes cookies, the website needs to remember that choice and behave accordingly. New integrations, experiments, or even changes to a page’s settings can unintentionally affect that behavior.

Manually checking that cookie banners continue to work as expected across all of our websites requires hours of quality assurance. To make those checks more manageable, we built a cookie auditor that acts like a privacy-conscious user. It visits Dropbox web pages and checks that they only load cookies consistent with that user’s privacy preferences. This gives us a scalable way to put our privacy commitments into practice as our web presence continues to evolve.

Challenges in cookie banner compliance