ENGAGING WITH COOKIE BANNERS: A QUALITATIVE STUDY WITH DANISH MILLENNIALS

Abstract: Significant amounts of data are generated, collected, and analyzed when users interact with the websites. Businesses and other organizations collect data for various purposes such as improving their services and products, personalizing website experience for users, etc. However, those practices are also receiving criticism for putting the users' privacy at risk and supposedly having a more significant overall impact on the future of a society that cannot yet be imagined. Web cookie tracking practices are one of the many issues discussed within data privacy. European Union has come up with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), aiming to ensure that European citizens are provided with transparency and control to decide over what data to share with the websites. As a result, websites operating in European Union greet visitors with cookie banners, supposedly giving users a choice to decide what they want to share with the website. However, the efficacy of this transparency is being questioned. Therefore, I used qualitative research to explore how Danish millennials engage with cookie banners and what are their privacy concerns when browsing online. Furthermore, I used a workshop with participants to create prototypes and identify the factors that could potentially encourage users to engage and give a motivated response when presented with cookie banners. The results indicated that while all the participants were concerned about privacy when browsing online, they could not name the privacy issues related to the cookies and explain the purpose behind the cookie banners. These results suggest that the users lack knowledge concerning interactions with cookie banners. The results of the workshop with participants helped to identify some of the factors that might improve the implementation of cookie banners and might encourage users to engage with cookie banners more. Elements such as integrated videos, which would increase critical big data literacy, are presented together with the cookie banners to provide users with the knowledge of why and how to engage with cookie banners. As well as more unified designs of the cookie banners regulated by government authorities rather than designed by websites.