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

Paper i proceeding, 2025

Cookie pay walls 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 pay walls and the handling of users’ data. Using an automatic crawler on our dataset composed of 804 websites that present a cookie pay wall, we observed that the presence of a cookie pay wall was most affected by the geographic location of the user. We further showed that both the behavior of a cookie pay wall 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 pay wall was discovered on ∼ 11% of the studied websites, coined the “double pay wall”, which consists of a cookie pay wall complemented by another pay wall once tracking is accepted.