Compliance Testing

Discovery Questions

First, check for .agents/qa-project-context.md in the project root — it carries applicable regulations, CMP details, ad networks, and geographic scope. Skip any question already answered there. If it is missing, suggest creating one with the qa-project-context skill.

Applicable regulations

• Which privacy and platform regulations apply? This sets the entire test matrix.
  • EU: GDPR, ePrivacy Directive (cookies), Digital Services Act (DSA, applied 17 Feb 2024), EU AI Act (prohibitions + AI literacy live since 2 Feb 2025; GPAI obligations + penalties since 2 Aug 2025; Article 50 transparency from 2 Aug 2026 — high-risk obligations postponed, see below).
  • US: CCPA/CPRA plus comprehensive state laws now active in ~20 states (Texas TDPSA, Indiana CDPA eff. 1 Jan 2026, Delaware DPDPA, Nebraska NDPA, Minnesota CDPA, Rhode Island DTPPA, …). Most require honoring Global Privacy Control (Sec-GPC: 1).
  • UK: UK GDPR/DPA, PECR (cookies), Online Safety Act 2023, Data Use and Access Act (DUAA).
  • Other: LGPD (Brazil), PIPEDA (Canada), POPIA (South Africa).
• What is the legal basis for processing? Consent (opt-in), legitimate interest, or contractual necessity — this decides whether explicit consent must precede processing.
• Is there a DPO or legal team? They define the legal requirements; this skill only validates the technical implementation against them.

Consent management

• What CMP is in use? OneTrust, Cookiebot, Didomi, Usercentrics, Iubenda, Sourcepoint, or Axeptio — or custom? The CMP sets the consent storage format, API, and integration. If you serve ads in the EEA or UK, you must use a Google-certified CMP and Consent Mode v2 — uncertified CMPs block Google ad serving. As of 28 Feb 2026, new TC strings must be TCF v2.3 or Google demand treats traffic as unconsented and drops to Limited Ads.
• What consent categories exist? Typically Strictly Necessary (always on), Analytics/Performance, Functional/Preferences, Marketing/Targeting.
• How is consent signaled to third-party scripts? IAB TCF v2 (__tcfapi), a custom data layer, or direct CMP API?

Advertising and accessibility

• What ad networks and formats? Google Ads, Meta, programmatic; display, video, interstitial. The Coalition for Better Ads defines which formats trigger Chrome ad-filtering.
• Are there accessibility obligations (ADA, EAA, Section 508)? Those are real compliance, but author them in accessibility-testing — this skill only maps the legal landscape, see below.

Core Principles

1. Compliance is binary

There is no "mostly compliant." A cookie that fires before consent is a violation. A banner you cannot dismiss without accepting is a violation. Test for exact compliance, not "good enough."

2. Automate the technical checks, schedule the legal audits

Automate: cookies before consent, scripts loading without consent, banner functionality, cookie attributes, consent persistence, GPC, Consent Mode signals. A human still audits privacy-policy language and cross-border transfer documentation. Don't pretend a test settles a legal-language question.

3. Test the unhappy consent states

The compliance boundary lives in the "no interaction," "rejected," and "withdrawn" states — that is where violations hide. The "all accepted" state is the least interesting one to test.

4. Verify behavior, not the CMP

CMPs have bugs. Don't trust the CMP UI as proof. Assert the actual outcome: were cookies set, did scripts load, was the GPC opt-out registered. The CMP is an implementation detail; compliance is measured by behavior.

5. Defense in depth, config-driven

Verify at multiple layers — CMP config, network requests, cookie state, client signals. Drive tests from a typed inventory and a tracking-domain list so adding a category or threshold is a data edit, not a suite rewrite. Regulations change; the suite must be cheap to update.

GDPR / CMP Testing with Playwright

Consent-flow compliance breaks into distinct, independently failing checks. Full runnable code for each is in references/gdpr-cmp-tests.md.

• Consent banner and dark patterns — banner appears on first visit; accept and reject have equal prominence (reject is not a tiny link); a privacy-policy link is present.
• Cookie state before/after consent — the critical test: no non-essential cookies before consent; analytics cookies only after accepting; nothing non-essential after rejecting. Maintain isStrictlyNecessary / isAnalyticsCookie classifiers against your inventory.
• Consent persistence and withdrawal — consent survives navigation; the user can withdraw via privacy settings, which must then clear the relevant cookies.
• Third-party script blocking — tracking scripts (google-analytics.com, googletagmanager.com, facebook.net, analytics.tiktok.com, bat.bing.com, …) must not load before consent and should load after acceptance. This is the most critical check — monitor with page.on('request').
• Global Privacy Control (Sec-GPC: 1) — a required honored signal under CCPA/CPRA and most active US state laws. With the header set, assert navigator.globalPrivacyControl === true (the real browser signal) and that marketing cookies are absent. Do not assert an invented window.__cmp.gpcStatus global — it does not exist; TCF v1's __cmp is legacy and TCF v2 uses __tcfapi.
• TCF v2 consent state — every TCF-certified CMP exposes window.__tcfapi('getTCData', 2, cb). Read purpose/vendor consent through it directly instead of guessing at CMP-private globals; the same call exposes tcfPolicyVersion, which doubles as a TCF-v2.3 freshness guard.
• Google Consent Mode v2 — required since March 2024 for Google ads in the EEA/UK. Default state must be denied for ad_storage / analytics_storage / ad_user_data / ad_personalization; an update signal must fire granted after acceptance. The interception assumes the gtag arguments-array shape — note the object-form fallback in the reference.

EU AI Act Compliance

The Act applies in phases, and the timeline shifted in 2026. Note: the Digital Omnibus (Nov 2025 proposal; 7 May 2026 provisional agreement) postponed the high-risk obligations — do not test against the old 2 Aug 2026 high-risk date.

Write the Article 50 disclosure test now; defer the high-risk UI tests until the Annex III obligations land. See references/eu-ai-act-tests.md for the Article 50 transparency-disclosure test and the Article 5 prohibited-practice (biometric library) gate. For LLM-specific evaluation (hallucination, jailbreak resistance, prompt-injection), use the ai-system-testing skill.

Better Ads Standards

The Coalition for Better Ads defines ad formats that trigger browser-level ad filtering (Chrome filters ads on non-compliant sites).

The muted-video check must read the live DOM property (el.muted), not getAttribute('muted') — player scripts set video.muted = true in JS without ever adding the content attribute, so an attribute-only check reports muted ads as having sound and misses muted-then-unmuted ads.

Note: the CBA added two desktop and two mobile ad experiences on 14 Jan 2025; Chrome assessment of those begins no earlier than 14 May 2026. Re-check newer combined formats against the current Better Ads Standards page before that date. See references/better-ads-tests.md for the auto-playing-video and mobile ad-density checks.

Cookie Compliance

Maintain a typed cookie inventory as the source of truth, then assert that actual cookies match it on three axes:

• Inventory — a CookieDefinition[] capturing name, category, purpose, max expiry, and the Secure / HttpOnly / SameSite attributes each cookie must carry.
• Attribute validation — every observed cookie must match its definition's flags and not exceed its declared max expiry. Normalize an unset SameSite to None before comparing — Playwright omits or varies it when the server doesn't set it, so an un-normalized check fails spuriously or passes silently.
• Drift detection — fail the suite (throw, don't warn) when a cookie appears that is not in the inventory, forcing the inventory to stay current as scripts are added.

See references/cookie-compliance.md for the typed inventory and both implementations.

Accessibility Compliance — legal map only

Accessibility is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions, but author the actual tests in accessibility-testing (axe-core, keyboard, screen reader). This table is only the legal landscape so you know what the obligation is.

Scheduled Compliance Audits

Run compliance tests weekly (not just on PR) to catch configuration drift, and retain results as long-lived CI artifacts for the audit trail. See references/ci-automation.md for the scheduled GitHub Actions workflow with 90-day artifact retention.

Anti-Patterns

Testing only with consent accepted

Running compliance tests only in the "all accepted" state. The compliance boundary is the "no interaction" and "rejected" states — that is where violations hide. Test every state: no interaction, accepted, rejected, partially accepted, withdrawn.

Asserting an invented CMP global

Checking window.__cmp.gpcStatus or similar fabricated globals to "prove" a GPC opt-out. That global does not exist. Assert navigator.globalPrivacyControl === true and verify marketing cookies are absent; read real consent state via __tcfapi.

Attribute-only video checks

Treating getAttribute('muted') === null as "has sound." The content attribute is frequently absent on programmatically-muted videos. Read el.muted / el.autoplay live properties instead.

Hardcoded cookie lists that drift

A cookie inventory nobody updates. Use the drift-detection test that throws on any unknown cookie — reality and inventory stay in sync automatically.

CMP-only testing

Trusting the CMP and only exercising its UI. CMPs have bugs. Test the outcome: cookies set, scripts loaded, data transmitted.

Manual-only quarterly audits

Auditing by hand once a quarter. Between audits a developer adds an analytics script that fires before consent and nobody notices for three months. Automated tests catch it on the next CI run.

Ignoring regional differences

One global consent model. GDPR requires opt-in; CCPA allows opt-out via GPC. Serving both regions means testing both experiences.

Treating compliance as one-time

Building the suite once and freezing it. Regulations evolve (ePrivacy Regulation, TCF version bumps, AI Act phases, updated CBA standards). Review quarterly.

Verification

Smallest check first — confirm the compliance suite runs and gates before trusting it:

npx playwright test --project=chromium --grep @compliance

A correct run shows the unhappy-path tests as the gate: "no non-essential cookies before consent" and "no tracking scripts load before consent" must pass on a fresh context (storageState: undefined). To prove the suite actually catches violations, temporarily point it at a page that loads GA before consent — the script-blocking test must go red. A suite that stays green against a known-bad page is asserting nothing. Then confirm the GPC test sees navigator.globalPrivacyControl === true with the Sec-GPC: 1 header set, and that the Consent Mode default-state test reports denied for all four signals.

Done When

• Applicable regulations identified for the product and geographic audience (GDPR, ePrivacy, DSA, EU AI Act, the relevant US state-law subset, UK OSA/DUAA) and documented in .agents/qa-project-context.md.
• Consent flow tested for every entry point: first visit, accept, reject, withdrawal, and cross-navigation persistence — each as a distinct passing test.
• Global Privacy Control honored: with Sec-GPC: 1, navigator.globalPrivacyControl === true and marketing cookies absent.
• Google Consent Mode v2 verified: default denied for ad_storage / analytics_storage / ad_user_data / ad_personalization; update fires granted after accept (only required for sites serving Google ads in EEA/UK).
• EU AI Act applicability assessed: prohibited-practice gate, GPAI documentation review (if applicable), and Article 50 transparency disclosure tested for any AI-generated content.
• Cookie audit complete: all cookies categorized in the typed inventory; drift-detection test passes with zero unknown cookies.
• No undeclared tracking domains or cookies fire that the privacy policy does not disclose (the automatable half — legal-language review is a separate manual/legal sign-off, not a test).
• Compliance suite runs green in the weekly CI job with results stored as artifacts at 90-day retention.

Related Skills

• accessibility-testing — Author the actual WCAG/axe-core/keyboard/screen-reader tests there. This skill only maps the accessibility legal landscape; it does not write a11y assertions.
• security-testing — Security compliance (OWASP Top 10:2025, dependency and supply-chain scanning) complements privacy compliance; different threat model, different tools.
• ai-system-testing — Defines the eval layer (hallucination, jailbreak, prompt-injection) for AI features. This skill only tests the Article 50 disclosure; that skill tests whether the AI itself behaves.
• ci-cd-integration — Pipeline configuration for the scheduled weekly audit and compliance quality gates.
• release-readiness — A failing compliance gate (consent firing before opt-in, missing AI Act disclosure) is a release blocker; wire this suite into the go/no-go checklist there.

Reference Files (in references/)

• gdpr-cmp-tests.md — Playwright code for banners/dark patterns, cookie state before/after consent, persistence and withdrawal, third-party script blocking, Global Privacy Control (navigator.globalPrivacyControl), TCF v2 __tcfapi consent read + v2.3 version guard, and Google Consent Mode v2.
• eu-ai-act-tests.md — Article 50 transparency-disclosure test and the Article 5 prohibited-practice (biometric library) gate, with the Omnibus timeline note.
• better-ads-tests.md — Coalition for Better Ads checks: live-property auto-playing-unmuted-video detection and mobile ad-density measurement.
• cookie-compliance.md — Typed cookie inventory, attribute validation (with SameSite normalization), and inventory drift detection.
• ci-automation.md — Scheduled weekly compliance-audit GitHub Actions workflow with 90-day artifact retention.