A Cookie Banner Listed 1,467 Partners — So I Used AI to Unmask Them

The Moment That Started It All Someone sent me a link to an article on the Bristol Post — a local UK news site — and when I clicked on it, a consent dialog popped up. Nothing unusual there. But something made me look closer at the fine print this time. The dialog was asking me to agree to share my data with 1,467 partners . One thousand, four hundred and sixty-seven. So I did what anyone would do — I tried to find out more. I clicked and scrolled through the partner list in the dialog, clicking into individual entries, reading purpose descriptions and "legitimate interest" declarations and quickly fell into a rabbit hole. Hundreds of company names I'd never heard of, vague descriptions of data processing purposes, toggles nested inside toggles. After ten minutes I was no closer to understanding what any of these companies actually did with my data, or why a local news article needed nearly fifteen hundred of them. The dialog was technically giving me information, but in practice it tol