A Concept and Evaluation of Usable and Fine-Grained Privacy-Friendly Cookie Settings Interface

As cookies are commonly used on websites, they can constitute a significant threat to user’s privacy by tracking surfing behaviour. The browsers provide a variety of options for cookie settings, thereby potentially enabling the user to execute some control over the extent of being tracked. However, studies show that the interfaces for these settings are often deemed too confusing or complex for lay users, often failing to provide necessary explanations, and therefore preventing the users from properly using these setting interfaces to protect themselves against tracking. In this paper, we present a concept for a privacy-friendly cookie setting interface that is meant to support the user in configuring their cookie settings. The setting interface in our concept (1) uses an assistant to guide the user towards their preferred cookie settings via a series of questions; and (2) enables the user to set their cookie settings manually, providing explanations for each of the options available to the user, including the potential advantages and disadvantages of each option. To gauge the viability of the proposal, the concept has been implemented as a Chrome extension and evaluated in a user study with 21 participants. The results have shown, that the extension is well received by the participants and provides better usability than the standard cookie settings interface in Chrome