We Tried The EDPB Website Auditing Tool: It Doesn’t Cut It
If you’re relying on the EDPB Website Auditing Tool to check your GDPR or web privacy compliance, then be prepared to spend a lot of resources for results you can’t completely trust.
This tool may come from a credible source, but that doesn’t make it efficient or thorough enough for real-world, enterprise-grade compliance.
Let’s break it down.
What Is the EDPB Website Audit Tool, Anyway?
The EDPB Website Audit Tool is a free utility developed by the European Data Protection Board. It’s designed to help website owners manually audit websites for GDPR compliance by logging network activity and identifying cookies, trackers, and storage mechanisms.
Sounds helpful. But it’s incredibly basic and painfully tedious to use.
You open web pages like you would in a normal browser. It logs all the storage, cookies, and requests, essentially what you’d see in Chrome DevTools. Then, you have to go through each data point manually, one by one, and label it “compliant” or “not compliant.”
And that’s not just once per website. It’s once per page, per check. Every time you want to test. The process could take hours per page. That’s not a scalable solution.
Why the EDPB Tool Doesn’t Cut It
Let’s be honest: the tool wasn’t built for the real world. Here’s what it’s missing:
- One page at a time. Got 5,000 pages? Start clicking. Hope you brought snacks.
- No automation. No scheduled scans. No continuous monitoring. Just you and your mouse.
- No context. The tool dumps all cookies, tags, and requests, authorized or not. You’re left to figure out what’s legit.
- No compliance judgment. The tool doesn’t tell you if you’re compliant. It just shows you data and says, “Good luck.”
- Limited consent simulation. You can create scenarios to test opt-in and opt-out, but you can’t test for overall browser preferences, and you would have to test every scenario one page at a time.
- Same data as DevTools. If you know your way around a browser, you’re getting nothing new here.
- Outdated tracker list. It uses a blocklist that hasn’t been updated in over 18 months. That’s ancient in internet years.
And perhaps worst of all:
- No location support. With EDPB, you’re limited to EU/GDPR testing. Want to test Global Privacy Control (GPC) for CCPA? Too bad. The tool isn’t built for that. You could try a VPN or proxy, but now you must re-run all your tests for every location, manually. That’s a nightmare for QA.
If your privacy compliance strategy relies on the EDPB tool, then:
- You’re opening up your audits to many points of human error
- Your teams will simply stop running these labor-intensive website audits
- Your privacy compliance will then suffer as a result of not being tested or governed.
ObservePoint: Built for Privacy Compliance at Scale
Real privacy compliance demands scale, automation, and insight. ObservePoint delivers all three:
- Every page of every site you own can be scanned. Automatically.
- Schedule audits daily, weekly, monthly, or at a cadence of your choice for continuous coverage.
- Unauthorized cookies, tags, and domains are flagged clearly so you know what’s most urgent.
- Consent choices like opted-in, opted-out, GPC-enabled can be automated.
- Test from dozens of locations to validate compliance across the globe.
- Integrate with your Consent Management Platform to automatically know your approved cookie list.
- Get real insight into tracking behavior across your digital footprint.
- The tracker library is updated weekly so you can be aware of fresh, new vendors.
- Audit-ready reports help roll up compliance across multiple sites and teams.
Instead of just telling you what’s on your page, ObservePoint reports potential violations and proves you’re doing privacy right.
The Bottom Line
The EDPB Website Audit Tool is a mediocre spot checker (here’s a better, free one if that’s what you want), which might be useful for seeing what the regulators will see.
But, it’s not built for privacy compliance at scale. It’s not automated. It’s hard to use. It’s super time-consuming.
Your customers deserve better. And, you can stay a step ahead of regulators. Your business depends on it.
If privacy compliance is in your purview, trust a solution that’s actually built for the job.
Trust ObservePoint
Holler if you’d like a quick demo. It’ll be so worth it.
