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Sarah Delgado Rodriguez, Lukas Mecke, Sarah Prange, Yen-Ni Sarah O, Christoph Hanschke, Florian Alt
“Gimme Cookie!” Exploring Tangible Privacy and Security for Cookie Management In The Wild
In MUM '26: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. November 8, 2026. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3861188.3861223 (bib)

Tangible Privacy and Security Interfaces (TaPSIs) transform abstract cybersecurity decisions and behaviors into physical forms to support cognition. However, prior research has rarely evaluated TaPSIs in the wild. Our work addresses this gap by focusing on browser cookies as an example of everyday yet abstract security topics. Cookies can put users' privacy and security at risk by enabling user profiling and being vulnerable to cyberattacks. We developed the Cookie Counter, a tangible cookie management prototype, and compared it to a purely digital browser extension in a two-week field study (N=16). While both versions were rated similarly in usability and user experience, participants in the tangible condition valued immediate visibility and ease of operation, but criticized its portability and the space it occupied. Our work contributes empirical field evidence to TaPSI research and illustrates trade-offs between constant physical peripheral visibility and seamless integration into existing digital workflows.