Deceptive Patterns
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Cookie Disclaimers: Impact of Design and Users’ Attitude

Author
B. Berens, H. Dietmann, Chiara Krisam, O. Kulyk, M. Volkamer
Date
23 Aug 2022
Publisher
ARES
Focus
Privacy & Data Protection
Category
Academic Scholar

It is shown that different visual representation of the reject/accept option have a significant impact on users’ decision and the design of the disclaimer only plays a secondary role when it comes to decision making.

Dark patterns in cookie disclaimers are factors that are used to lead users to accept more cookies than needed and more than they are aware of. The contributions of this paper are (1) evaluating the efficacy of several of these factors while measuring actual behavior; (2) identifying users’ attitude towards cookie disclaimers including how they decide which cookies to accept or reject. We show that different visual representation of the reject/accept option have a significant impact on users’ decision. We also found that the labeling of the reject option has a significant impact. In addition, we confirm previous research regarding biasing text (which has no significant impact on users’ decision).