Why can a regulator only catch a deceptive consent screen by reading it manually?

GDPR and FTC rules require freely given, unambiguous consent, but detection is entirely manual: investigators visit sites, walk through flows, and write reports. A 2026 arXiv study found that regulatory practitioners explicitly want automated detection but have no viable tooling to run at scale. Dark patterns shift dynamically: a service can hide opt-out paths during a review period and restore them afterward. With millions of sites and a handful of inspectors, enforcement is reactive, slow, and geographically uneven. No machine-readable standard for a consent record exists that would let an auditor replay the exact UI flow a user experienced at a given moment.