Cookie disclaimers are these days an indispensable part of surfing and working on the Internet. In this work, we report on examining and classifying the cookie disclaimers on the 500 most popular websites in Germany, based on the presented information about data collection via cookies and the provided choices at the cookie disclaimer. Our analysis results in 13 categories of cookie disclaimers, consisting of six main categories and additional subcategories. Our findings include that dark pattern based categories were prevalent among the cookie disclaimers: e.g. ( 1) more than 85% of the investigated websites providing a cookie disclaimer and giving the option to reject cookies are visually nudging users towards accepting all cookies; (2) Only 21.5% of those providing a cookie disclaimer offer a reject-all option with a single click. We discuss our results and conclude that both raising user awareness as well as addressing dark patterns from a legal point of view is needed.

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). Our results on users' attitude towards cookie disclaimers indicate that for several user groups the design of the disclaimer only plays a secondary role when it comes to decision making. We provide recommendations on how to improve the situation for the different user groups.

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