bnr.bg

Context

bnr.bg is the website of Bulgarian National Radio (Българско национално радио, BNR), the country’s public broadcaster and one of Bulgaria’s three public media organizations, alongside the national television broadcaster and the national news agency. The data controller is BNR. The site is built on Next.js. The broadcaster maintains a Privacy Policy and a separate Cookie Policy. Capture: 520 requests, 113 domains, recorded in a clean browser.

Direct Recipients of Data (prior to consent)

Google (USA) — the GPT advertising tag, Google Analytics, Funding Choices. Criteo, Rubicon (Magnite), PubMatic, OpenX, Xandr, Index Exchange, Teads, Outbrain, Adform, Smart/Equativ, Media.net, 33Across, ID5, InMobi, TripleLift, Sharethrough, RTB House, Smaato, LoopMe, Eskimi, BidSwitch, Opera Ads, Temu — IP address and identifiers via the advertising auction and cookie-sync (more than 100 third-party domains in total).

Declared versus Actual

BNR’s Cookie Policy states directly: cookies for advertising and targeting record the visit and are used to display personalized advertising, and their use requires the visitor’s consent. The Privacy Policy confirms this: processing via cookies is based on consent expressed on the site. Of the specific recipients, the policy names only the Google DoubleClick for Publishers platform by name, describing the rest generically as “advertisers and advertising networks.”

The capture reveals a fundamentally different picture. Advertising monetization launches almost immediately, without regard to consent. At +902 ms, immediately after the Next.js bundle loads, the Google Publisher Tag (securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/tag/js/gpt.js) and the bidmatic prebid wrapper launch. The consent banner — Google Funding Choices — appears only at +1826 ms, meaning the Google advertising tag has already executed before the visitor even sees a request for consent.

A full-scale advertising auction and identifier synchronization then unfold: the visitor’s IP address and identifiers are dispersed to more than 100 third-party domains — the largest RTB, DSP, and SSP platforms (Criteo, Rubicon, PubMatic, OpenX, Xandr, Index Exchange, Teads, Outbrain, Adform, Smart/Equativ, Media.net, 33Across, ID5, InMobi, TripleLift, RTB House, and dozens of others). Synchronization proceeds via redirect chains — 91 of them appear in the capture.

Critically: no consent is collected during the session, and this is evident from the requests themselves. In requests to partners, the TCF consent string is not substituted — the unmodified programmatic placeholder gdpr_consent={gdpr_consent} is sent instead. 177 requests carry gdpr=0, signaling to partners that GDPR does not apply to the processing. Google Analytics (identifier G-FDKFTKB3MV) transmits telemetry with the signal gcs=G100, corresponding to a state of “consent not given.” In other words, a consent mechanism is present on the site in the form of a banner, but the actual transfer of data to advertising partners does not depend on it and occurs irrespective of the user’s choice.

Timing Relative to Consent

The Google advertising tag loads at +902 ms; the consent banner only at +1826 ms. Identifier synchronization begins at +2959 ms and continues in a wave through the end of loading. All of this occurs with consent not collected: the TCF string placeholder is unfilled, gdpr=0 is transmitted, and Google Analytics flags the data as sent without consent. That is, between the banner’s appearance and the actual transfer of data to a hundred partners, there is no genuine pause for the user’s choice — the data leaves regardless of consent.

What Cannot Be Asserted from This Capture

The capture covers the home page in its pre-consent state. Set-Cookie is absent from the captured headers — in this capture, identifier synchronization is visible through redirect chains and request parameters rather than through Set-Cookie headers. Many advertising companies use edge nodes within the EU; the conclusion drawn therefore concerns the recipients’ corporate affiliation (a significant proportion being US companies), not the physical location of the nodes. Behavior following a click on “accept” or “reject” is not observed in this session; the capture records the state prior to any choice. Server-side processing is not visible in a browser-based capture.

Conclusion

The website of Bulgarian National Radio launches full-scale advertising monetization before the visitor can give consent: the Google advertising tag starts before the banner, after which the visitor’s IP address and identifiers are dispersed to more than 100 third-party advertising platforms. Meanwhile, consent is not, in fact, collected — partners receive an empty TCF string placeholder and a gdpr=0 signal, and Google Analytics flags the data as sent without consent. BNR’s Cookie Policy states directly the opposite: that advertising and targeting cookies are used only with consent. The discrepancy between what is declared and what actually occurs here is fundamental rather than technical: a consent mechanism is present in the form of a banner, but it does not govern the actual transfer of data. For a publicly funded public broadcaster, transferring audience data to a hundred advertising recipients without consent having been collected, and without disclosure of a named list of recipients, indicates non-compliance with the requirements concerning the legal basis for processing, the disclosure of recipients, and cross-border transfer.