Cookie Banners, What's the Purpose? Analyzing Cookie Banner Text Through a Legal Lens
Cristiana Santos, Arianna Rossi, Lorena S\'anchez Chamorro, Kerstin, Bongard-Blanchy, Ruba Abu-Salma

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the language used in cookie banners on popular websites to assess compliance with legal standards like GDPR and ePrivacy Directive, revealing widespread violations and suggesting regulatory improvements.
Contribution
It provides an interdisciplinary, manual analysis of cookie banner texts against legal requirements, highlighting common violations and offering practical recommendations for regulators.
Findings
89% of banners violated laws
61% used vague purposes
30% employed misleading positive framing
Abstract
A cookie banner pops up when a user visits a website for the first time, requesting consent to the use of cookies and other trackers for a variety of purposes. Unlike prior work that has focused on evaluating the user interface (UI) design of cookie banners, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of what cookie banners say to users to get their consent. We took an interdisciplinary approach to determining what cookie banners should say. Following the legal requirements of the ePrivacy Directive (ePD) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we manually annotated around 400 cookie banners presented on the most popular English-speaking websites visited by users residing in the EU. We focused on analyzing the purposes of cookie banners and how these purposes were expressed (e.g., any misleading or vague language, any use of jargon). We found that 89% of cookie banners violated…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
