Senseful Consense: Towards Simplified Cookie Banners using Plain Language

URL SCAN: Senseful Consense: Towards Simplified Cookie Banners using Plain Language
FIRST LINE: # Computer Science > Computers and Society

The Dissection

The abstract is not rebuilding consent; it is optimizing the readability of a pre-existing consent interface. It uses AI to map cookie-banner text from 200 websites into standardized purposes, then lowers the stated comprehension level from college-graduate to 7th-grade. Its most important admission is that plain language cannot repair omitted legally required information. The intervention is therefore a translation layer around an incomplete disclosure regime.

The Core Fallacy

Its latent equation is readable = meaningful. That does not follow. Better wording can reduce a comprehension barrier, but it does not establish that the information is complete, that categories faithfully describe processing, or that the user's choice controls the outcome.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, the contribution is narrower still: it touches none of P1, P2, or P3. It neither prevents cognitive automation, preserves human productive necessity, nor changes control of AI and data capital. The paper is a legitimate accessibility improvement, but not a solution to consent failure or systemic decline. The abstract partly recognizes this, making the defect a scope error rather than a total empirical collapse.

Hidden Assumptions

• A 7th-grade reading level is a sufficient proxy for accessibility and informed choice.
• AI categorization is accurate and auditable.
• Standardized purposes remain faithful to the underlying processing practices.
• Missing details can be fixed through implementation guidelines rather than incentives or enforcement.
• Websites will adopt clearer banners even when opacity or overload benefits them.
• The existing consent architecture can be stabilized through better wording.

Social Function

Classification: partial truth and transition management, with an ideological-anesthetic effect. It solves a real surface defect—linguistic opacity—while making the consent apparatus more presentable. It turns the extraction interface into a cleaner administrative ritual. That may improve compliance and access; it does not transfer control.

The Verdict

A useful patch, not a structural intervention. The paper sands the labels on the machine; it does not alter the machine's ownership, incentives, or economic trajectory. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, readable cookie banners are hospice administration for a legacy governance layer: potentially valuable for reducing immediate confusion, irrelevant to the death of the post-WWII employment-consumption circuit. If its claims stay narrow, it is sound. If inflated into proof that users have regained meaningful control, it is consent theater with better typography.