Are Cookie notices the cure that is worse than the disease?

With Google being recruited to be the EUs “Cookie police”, notices about cookie usage are literally popping-up all over the internet again.  Whilst some might argue that these notices are an important step for user privacy, I personally see them as an unnecessary annoyance that creates a jarring user experience and litters the web.  I totally agree that websites should provide clear information about cookie usage and data sharing, but pop-up alerts seem like an awful way to do this.

Who cares what I think though?  As someone who makes their living by helping website owners earn more from advertising I am clearly biased.  Interested to see whether that bias was clouding my judgement I commissioned a small survey and collected the opinions of these people the “Cookie law” is meant to protect: The Public.

It’s official: Cookie notices are more annoying that cookies.

Using Google consumer surveys I posed a single question to 500 UK internet users:

Which do you find more annoying on a website?

• Cookies being set in the background
• Pop-up notices about cookies
• I don’t know what a cookie is
• None of these

And here are the results:

Nearly five times as many users indicated the biggest annoyance was the notices than said the biggest annoyance was the Cookies.  Whilst I wouldn’t suggest that this means we ignore the 12.8% most annoyed by the cookies, it does call into question the way the issue is currently being addressed.

Mat Bennett

Mat has been supporting content creators on the web since 1996. As Co-founder of OKO Digital, Mat became the first person in the UK qualified to AdSense partner status and repeated this first with Google Certified Publishing Partner programme.