Gabriela Kurteva is a PhD student within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network ‘HARNESS – Harnessing AI and Data-Intensive Technologies’ enrolled at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Prof Dave Lewis, Dr Harshvardhan J. Pandit and Dr Edoardo Celeste.

She received her Master’s degree in Advanced Computer Science and Bachelor’s in Computer Science at Cardiff University, focusing her research on data privacy, protection and legal compliance from both human-centred and technical perspectives. Her work shades light on unlawful access practices to personal data through manipulative techniques – commonly known as Dark Patterns – which often remain invisible to the naked eye during user consent, within Consent Management Platforms (CMPs). By exploring what implications web cookies impose on the end-user through UI components such as cookie banners as per GDPR, her research further explored the role of cookies in privacy intrusions, informed consent violations and security vulnerabilities (e.g. XSS, CSRF), particularly in contexts where sensitive data sharing occurs between third parties.