Karel Kubicek is an independent researcher who got his PhD from ETH Zurich. Karel specializes in automating privacy compliance auditing for websites using machine learning and advanced web crawlers. His research focuses on detecting privacy violations such as invalid consent for cookie usage or marketing email communication. Karel also led the development of the privacy-enhancing browser extension, CookieBlock, with over 20k installations. CookieBlock automatically categorizes cookies based on purpose and filters them according to user preferences, effectively protecting users against the widespread privacy violations. Beyond these core areas, Karel has contributed to research on vulnerabilities in novel privacy technologies, usability evaluations of privacy-enhancing browser extensions, and the development of scraping methods for legal scholars.