  A cookie banner pops up when a user visits a website for the first time,
requesting consent to the use of cookies and other trackers for a variety of
purposes. Unlike prior work that has focused on evaluating the user interface
(UI) design of cookie banners, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of what
cookie banners say to users to get their consent. We took an interdisciplinary
approach to determining what cookie banners should say. Following the legal
requirements of the ePrivacy Directive (ePD) and the General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR), we manually annotated around 400 cookie banners presented on
the most popular English-speaking websites visited by users residing in the EU.
We focused on analyzing the purposes of cookie banners and how these purposes
were expressed (e.g., any misleading or vague language, any use of jargon). We
found that 89% of cookie banners violated applicable laws. In particular, 61%
of banners violated the purpose specificity requirement by mentioning vague
purposes, including "user experience enhancement". Further, 30% of banners used
positive framing, breaching the freely given and informed consent requirements.
Based on these findings, we provide recommendations that regulators can find
useful. We also describe future research directions.
