Hays was reported to the Deceptive Design Tip Line over a complicated cookie opt-out process. According to the report, the recruitment company’s “TrustArc” cookie dialogue has several confusing features:
- The first page places two blue buttons, “Agree and Proceed” and “Required Only”, on the hard left, with “View cookie settings” on the hard right in plain text.
- “View cookie settings” uses a vertical slider that must be dragged down to reveal which categories are enabled or disabled.
- To actually change the categories, the user must then click “Advanced settings”.
- The advanced settings allow Functional and Advertising cookies to be switched off, but to see what each category contains the user has to click “View Cookies” on each one.
- A pseudo-toggle to switch off Functional and Advertising cookies uses the values “out” and “in”, with the selection shown as blue text on a grey background.
- Only after this does the user click “Submit preferences”, at which point the choices are allegedly recorded.