Checking Websites’ GDPR Consent Compliance for Marketing Emails

Abstract The sending of marketing emails is regulated to protect users from unsolicited emails. For instance, the European Union’s ePrivacy Directive states that marketers must obtain users’ prior consent, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifies further such consent be freely given, specific, informed, unambiguous. Based on these requirements, we design a labeling legal characteristics for websites This leads simple decision procedure detects potential violations. Using our procedure, evaluated 1000 5000 resulting registering websites. Both datasets evaluations are available upon request. We find 21.9% contain violations privacy unfair competition rules, either in registration process (17.3%) or email communication (17.7%). demonstrate with statistical analysis possibility automatically detecting