Original title: Senseful Consense: Towards Simplified Cookie Banners using Plain Language
Minela Bećirović, Ha Dao, Mannat Kaur, Martin Johns +1 · September 2026
Websites must ask for permission to track you, but their cookie banners are usually full of confusing legal jargon. Researchers wanted to see if plain language could fix this. They collected cookie banners from 200 websites. Next, they used artificial intelligence to sort the banner text into standard data-processing categories. Then, they swapped out the difficult legal terms for everyday words. This change made the text much easier to read, dropping the reading difficulty from a college-graduate level down to a 7th-grade level. But plain language has limits. If the original banner left out required legal details, simple words could not bring that missing information back. Plain language helps, but banners also need standard rules.
Imagine a friend gives you a recipe written in dense restaurant shorthand. You can decode the words, but you still cannot tell whether 'fold' means stir or flip, and half the ingredients are missing. No amount of re-reading fixes it because the information was never there. In this paper, the notice on a website is the recipe, the legal jargon is the shorthand, and using simpler words makes the text readable — but if the notice omits required details, simpler words cannot add them back.
Every time you open a website, a cookie banner asks for consent — but most are written in legal language that many people cannot understand. This study shows that rewriting those banners in plain language can drop the reading level from college graduate to 7th grade, which could make consent genuinely informed. The catch: plain language only works if the banner actually contains the legally required details in the first place.
The abstract reports a feasibility study of only 200 websites, all within the IAB TCF, so the results may not generalise to other consent systems or regions. It does not measure whether simplified banners actually change users' consent decisions or behaviour. And as the authors note, plain language cannot compensate for banners that omit legally required information.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Senseful Consense: Towards Simplified Cookie Banners using Plain Language — Minela Bećirović, Ha Dao, Mannat Kaur et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.