Making Sense of Consent: A Feasibility Study on Simplifying Cookie Banners with Plain Language
This short paper introduces an approach to simplifying cookie banners by utilising the concept of plain language within an existing consent framework. In order to study its feasibility, we present a study in which we analysed the text of cookie banners on 200 websites and, using AI-based categorisation, classified the extracted content into standardised processing purposes. By substituting complex legal terms with simplified descriptions, we successfully demonstrated that the comprehension barrier can be lowered from a college-graduate level to a 7th-grade level. At the same time our results indicate that the effectiveness of plain language is inherently constrained by the informativeness of the original content; it cannot compensate for banners that omit legally required details.