While there is relatively little publicly available empirical data concerning website visitors’ interactions with cookie banners, the data that does exist indicates that user acceptance rates are significantly greater depending upon how many options are presented to a website visitor. For example, in one study researchers placed a cookie banner on a website that provided only two options – accept or reject cookies.1 They then placed a cookie banner on the same website that presented users with the ability to accept cookie deployment for specific third parties. They found that 20.9% of people that visited the website from a computer accepted the binary option, whereas less than 1% accepted cookies when presented with multiple options.2
1 Christine Utz, Martin Degeling, Sascha Fahl, Florian Schaub, and Thorsten Holz, 2019, (Un)informed Consent: Studying GDPR Consent Notices in the Field
2Id. at 9.