To Be or Not to Be (in the EU): Measurement of Discrepancies Presented in Cookie Paywalls

Andreas Stenwreth, Simon Täng, Victor Morel

2025

Abstract

Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its prevalence and legal standing, but the effects of the clients’ device and geographic location remain unexplored. To address these questions, this study explores the effects of three factors: 1) the clients’ browser, 2) the device type (desktop or mobile), and 3) the geographic location on the presence and behavior of cookie paywalls and the handling of users’ data. Using an automatic crawler on our dataset composed of 804 websites that present a cookie paywall, we observed that the presence of a cookie paywall was most affected by the geographic location of the user. We further showed that both the behavior of a cookie paywall and the processing of user data are impacted by all three factors, but no patterns of significance could be found. Finally, an additional type of paywall was discovered on ∼11% of the studied websites, coined the “double paywall”, which consists of a cookie paywall complemented by another paywall once tracking is accepted.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Stenwreth A., Täng S. and Morel V. (2025). To Be or Not to Be (in the EU): Measurement of Discrepancies Presented in Cookie Paywalls. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP; ISBN 978-989-758-735-1, SciTePress, pages 183-190. DOI: 10.5220/0013107800003899

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp25,
author={Andreas Stenwreth and Simon Täng and Victor Morel},
title={To Be or Not to Be (in the EU): Measurement of Discrepancies Presented in Cookie Paywalls},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP},
year={2025},
pages={183-190},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013107800003899},
isbn={978-989-758-735-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP
TI - To Be or Not to Be (in the EU): Measurement of Discrepancies Presented in Cookie Paywalls
SN - 978-989-758-735-1
AU - Stenwreth A.
AU - Täng S.
AU - Morel V.
PY - 2025
SP - 183
EP - 190
DO - 10.5220/0013107800003899
PB - SciTePress