ABSTRACT: Cookie consent mechanisms are the primary interface through which digital platforms seek user permission for personal data collection and processing. Yet large-scale empirical research consistently demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of consent dialogs are engineered to maximise acceptance rates rather than enable informed choice — a form of dark pattern exploitation that directly violates the spirit and letter of global data protection regulations including India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act 2023), the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Despite regulatory momentum, no publicly accessible real-time web tool provides citizens, researchers, or enforcement bodies with an automated, evidence-based mechanism to identify and score consent dark patterns at scale. This paper presents Consent Guardian (CG), a research-grade web platform implementing a hybrid three-stage detection pipeline for real-time analysis of cookie consent interfaces on any user-specified URL. Twelve purpose-built deterministic heuristic rules evaluate structural DOM properties of consent banners; a Large Language Model (Llama 3.3 70B via Groq) provides semantic verification for ambiguous detections (confidence 40–75%); and a visual analytics dashboard presents colour-coded violation maps, per-category severity breakdowns, and a 0–100 Privacy Rights Score with letter grades. The platform exports structured JSON evidence suitable for regulatory documentation and academic research. Evaluation across a purposely-constructed adversarial consent page and informal testing on representative ecommerce and news platforms demonstrates detection of ten consent dark pattern categories within 1.2 seconds of URL submission. The system is designed as both a consumer awareness tool and a longitudinal research instrument for tracking regulatory compliance trends across jurisdictions.
KEYWORDS: Cybersecurity, Password Management, Credential Security, Fernet Encryption, JWT Authentication, Access Control, Activity Monitoring, Vaultix.
VAULTIX AN INTELLIGENT ZERO – KNOWLEDGE GEO-RESTRICTED VAULT
ATHARVA R. KHOT
JITESHREE P. RAUT