Cookie Paywall Discrepancies: Assessing differences between operating systems, web browsers and geographic locations

Abstract

The cookie paywall allows visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee or accepting tracking. The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its prevalence and legal standing, but the effects of the client’s device and geographic location remain unexplored. To address these questions, this study explores the effects of the client’s browser, device type (desktop or mobile), and geographic location on the presence and behaviour of cookie paywalls and the handling of users’ data. Using an automatic crawler on a dataset with 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 behaviour of a cookie paywall and the processing of user data are affected by all three factors, but no patterns of significance could be found. Finally, an additional type of paywall was discovered to be used on approximately 11% of the studied websites, namely the “double paywall”, which consists of a cookie paywall that is complemented by a hard or soft paywall once tracking is accepted.