This Website Uses Nudging: MTurk Workers' Behaviour on Cookie Consent Notices

Abstract

Data protection regulatory policies, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), force website operators to request users' consent before collecting any personal information revealed through their web browsing. Website operators, motivated by the potential value of the collected personal data, employ various methods when designing consent notices (e.g., dark patterns) in order to convince users to allow the collection of as much of their personal data as possible. In this paper, we design and conduct a user study where 1100 MTurk workers interact with eight different designs of cookie consent notices. We show that the nudging designs used in the different cookie consent notices have a large effect on the choices user make. Our results show that color-based nudging bars can significantly impact the participants' decisions to change the default cookie settings, despite using dark patterns. Also, in contrast to previous works, we report that users who do not use ad-blocking software are less likely to modify default cookie settings. Our findings demonstrate the importance of nudged interfaces and the effects orthogonal nudging techniques can have on users' choices.