Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its prevalence and legal standing, but the effects of the clients' device and geographic location remain unexplored. To address these questions, this study explores the effects of three factors: 1) the clients' browser, 2) the device type (desktop or mobile), and 3) the geographic location on the presence and behavior of cookie paywalls and the handling of users' data. Using an automatic crawler on our dataset composed of 804 websites that present a cookie paywall, we observed that the presence of a cookie paywall was most affected by the geographic location of the user. We further showed that both the behavior of a cookie paywall and the processing of user data are impacted by all three factors, but no patterns of significance could be found. Finally, an additional type of paywall was discovered to be used on approximately 11% of the studied websites, coined the "double paywall", which consists of a cookie paywall complemented by another paywall once tracking is accepted.

翻译：Cookie付费墙要求访问者在支付费用（付费选项）或接受追踪（Cookie选项）之间做出选择后，才能访问网站内容。先前研究已就该做法的普遍性和法律地位进行探讨，但用户设备和地理位置的影响尚未得到检验。为探究这些问题，本研究考察了三个因素对Cookie付费墙的存在与行为以及用户数据处理方式的影响：1）用户浏览器类型；2）设备类型（桌面端或移动端）；3）地理位置。通过对包含804个设置Cookie付费墙的网站数据集进行自动爬取，我们发现用户地理位置对Cookie付费墙的出现具有最显著的影响。进一步研究表明，Cookie付费墙的行为模式和用户数据处理均受三个因素共同影响，但未发现具有统计学意义的规律。最后，本研究在约11%的被调查网站中发现了一种新型付费墙——"双重付费墙"，即在用户接受追踪后，Cookie付费墙会与另一层付费墙共同生效。