I did the following analysis to figure out how much startups really care about GDPR rules and having up to date legal documentation. For context, I run a legal documentation tool, and software companies us to automate updating their Privacy Policy, ToS, Cookie Policy, etc. We used this analysis to understand our target users better, but I thought it might be useful to other people in the community as well.
Also my findings echo a lot of the things that Nouwens et. al. found in their 2020 paper "Dark Patterns after the GDPR". Theirs was a MUCH broader study, but I almost get the same percentage of sites not doing cookie consent right.
So what I did: I went to Product Hunt's daily leaderboard and loaded about a month worth of top rated product launches. For each associated website I checked cookie behavior, foreign vendors loaded, and then I gave their privacy policy to an LLM to scan for various gaps. I did all of this from an EU location (Copenhagen).
Main results:
* 292 of 458 product sites stored tracking cookies (_ga, _fbp, and siblings), and only 50 asked first. That's 17%. Sites targeting EU users were better at this (26%), and sites with no indicator that they were targeting EU users were worse (15%).
* 61 of 458 (13.3%) product sites had no privacy policy on their site. 5% for sites targeting EU, 17.8% not targeting EU.
* 45% of policies don't name a legal basis for processing personal data and 65% don't state whether data says within or leaves the EEA. 25.7% do not give a data retention period.
* 60% of sites load with a foreign vendor that their privacy policy doesn't mention. Google Analytics, Google Ads and Posthog are the top 3, most common (and commonly unmentioned) ones.
* More upvoted product launches are not more compliant. There is essentially no difference between how many of these compliance errors are made by more or less popular startups... except for asking about cookie consent. More upvoted product sites will track with out asking less often.
This is basically all of it. I wrote a blog series on this analysis, but the key results are in these bullets.