Pixel Patrol: a GDPR watchdog whose main job is staying quiet
I built Pixel Patrol for the All Things Agentic hackathon, and this post is part of that submission. Code is at https://github.com/thatmike1/pixel-patrol . The problem Cookie policies are documents about software, and they go stale the moment the software changes. Someone in marketing adds a Meta Pixel through the tag manager on a Tuesday afternoon. Nobody tells the person whose name is on the…
Pixel Patrol is a privacy watchdog developed for the All Things Agentic hackathon, aimed at keeping up with evolving cookie policies. The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/thatmike1/pixel-patrol. The issue arises because cookie policies become obsolete the moment a website's software updates, leading to unnoticed personal data processing under GDPR regulations.
The solution involves Pixel Patrol checking websites hourly using Playwright and Playwright in a Cloud Run job. It records every third-party host and cookie, both before and after the consent banner is dismissed, and compares the results with approved baselines. When an unauthorized tracker appears, it identifies the vendor, updates the cookie policy, writes the Records of Processing Activities (RoPA) row, opens a GitHub issue, and sends an email to the site owner.
The system employs deterministic code to differentiate between noise and drift, ensuring accurate reporting. Despite occasional errors, such as misidentifying a tracker, the system has successfully caught a few bugs, like a misspelled vendor name. The entire setup is built using TypeScript on Node.js, with components like Google ADK agents, Cloud Scheduler, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Firestore, Secret Manager, Cloud Build, and Artifact Registry.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
