Founder’s Note

I don’t fully trust CMPs.

Not because they’re useless: they’re necessary. But because websites are living, breathing messes, and if I’m honest, I don’t trust myself to keep them perfectly locked down forever.

That’s the uncomfortable reality. You install the CMP, configure it carefully, watch the banner appear, and mentally check the “compliance done” box. Then life happens.

The problem is, websites don't stay the same.

A marketer drops a new pixel into GTM on a Tuesday. An agency adds a chat widget. A plugin auto-updates and quietly re-inserts a tracking script. You do a quick Friday-afternoon deploy and tell yourself you’ll sort the consent bit “later.” None of it feels like sabotage. It just feels like progress. Nobody announces, “I may have just compromised your consent setup.” They just add the feature and carry on.

Tag Manager makes it dangerously easy to bypass your carefully crafted rules. It’s designed to make scripts easy to add, which is exactly why everyone uses it. It also means your website can change behavior without you ever touching the codebase again. You can have a perfectly configured CMP and still have something firing before consent, simply because it lives somewhere else.

Consent Mode helps, but it still relies on everything being wired correctly. And on a real website, something is always wired wrong: a legacy landing page with hard-coded GA, a headless shop on a different domain, or a forgotten script from 2022.

None of this happens because people are bad at their jobs. It happens because websites grow organically. People come and go. Priorities shift. Eventually, you end up with a site that works beautifully, and nobody can swear what’s actually firing on page load.

When the question comes, “Are we compliant?” the truthful answer is almost always: “I think so.”

And “I think so” stops being good enough the moment someone asks for proof.

I built PrivacyProbe because I got tired of guessing.

Not to replace CMPs, and not because developers are careless. I just wanted one clear, repeatable way to see the raw truth: what trackers, cookies, and requests fire before the user even sees the banner. Not what the settings or the documentation promise. What actually executes in the browser.

Sometimes it’s clean. Sometimes you discover ghosts you forgot existed.

Modern websites aren’t broken. They’re just messy. PrivacyProbe exists so “probably fine” can finally become “we know.”