As Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in May 2018, bringing in a tough new regime of fines for non-compliance, websites responded by popping up legal disclaimers which signpost visitor tracking activities.

The study, which looked at how consumers interact with different designs of cookie pop-ups and how various design choices can nudge and influence people’s privacy choices, also suggests consumers are suffering a degree of confusion about how cookies function, as well as being generally mistrustful of the term ‘cookie’ itself.

The researchers conclude that if consent to drop cookies was being collected in a way that’s compliant with the EU’s existing privacy laws only a tiny fraction of consumers would agree to be tracked.

They also worked with a German ecommerce website over a period of four months to study how more than 82,000 unique visitors to the site interacted with various cookie consent designs which the researchers’ tweaked in order to explore how different defaults and design choices affected individuals’ privacy choices.

Their industry snapshot of cookie consent notices found that the majority are placed at the bottom of the screen (58%); not blocking the interaction with the website (93%); and offering no options other than a confirmation button that does not do anything (86%).

A majority also try to nudge users towards consenting (57%) — such as by using ‘dark pattern’ techniques like using a color to highlight the ‘agree’ button (which if clicked accepts privacy-unfriendly defaults) vs displaying a much less visible link to ‘more options’ so that pro-privacy choices are buried off screen.