Improving the Usability of Requests for Consent to Use Cookies

Abstract

An HTTP cookie (hereinafter cookie) is a piece of information that maintains a state in a stateless HTTP protocol. Recently established privacy and security regulation imposes an obligation on the service provider to obtain the user’s consent to use cookies. This paper is aimed at studying usability guidelines of requests for consent to use cookies (hereinafter consent requests). The consent requests have usability issues that make it difficult for the users to choose the right privacy and security options. A study of privacy and security regulation is aimed at extracting design requirements. Manipulative designs also known as dark patterns are explored and applied to assess consent requests of two of the most popular Lithuanian news portals. An evaluation revealed the presence of dark patterns in consent requests as well as violation of privacy and security requirements. As a result, usability guidelines on the design of cookie consent requests are developed.