Impossible Consent: Generative Search, Browsewrap, and the Rights-Information Harm to Cognitively Disabled Users

Abstract

A person searches for the law that protects them and receives, at the top of the page, an authoritative answer that is wrong, accompanied by a cited source that confirms the error rather than correcting it. This paper examines that event as a distinct kind of harm, separate from the commercial deception that dominates discussion of generative search. When an automated system delivers false information about a person’s own legal rights to a member of the protected class those rights exist to serve, the injury is not a lost sale but a right unasserted, a wrongful denial accepted, a deadline misjudged. I argue that this harm falls hardest on people with neurodevelopmental conditions, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and cognitive decline, who are least able to independently evaluate the answer and most exposed to acting on it, and I name the mechanism that defeats their last line of defense: counterfeit verifiability, in which the citation that is supposed to let a careful reader check the claim instead confirms the false claim. I then turn to the platform’s anticipated defenses, which rest on terms a logged-out search user is said to accept by mere use. Drawing on the current acceptance language of a major provider, I show that this is browsewrap, the weakest form of online assent, and that for cognitively disabled users it is not merely weak but structurally unattainable. I call this condition impossible consent: agreement imputed to a person through a channel that the nature of their disability makes it impossible to satisfy. Because the provider’s liability disclaimers and any dispute-resolution terms rest entirely on that imputed assent, they fail precisely against the population the harm reaches. The inaccessibility of the consent channel is itself an access problem, which moves the analysis from contract into disability law. I close by distinguishing what this clears, the defenses, from what remains open, the affirmative cause of action.

Keywords

• browsewrap
• contractual capacity
• impossible consent
• disability rights
• generative search
• AI Overviews
• access to justice
• ADA
• counterfeit verifiability