European Authorities Ban Dirty Cookie Practices in GDPR Update
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European Authorities Ban Dirty Cookie Practices in GDPR Update:
When GDPR rolled out across the European Union back in 2018, the sweeping legal framework pledged to bring consumer privacy and protection to the forefront. In the years since then, we've seen the adtech industry at large do its collective darnedest to undermine these laws at every turn, and largely get away with it, thanks in part to the squishy phrasing of some of the legislation's most critical clauses.
Now, European authorities are stepping in to cut that squishiness a bit. On Monday, the European Data Protection Board-the Union's oversight committee for GDPR-related issues-released a 31-page manual (pdf) calling out some of the slimier practices used by adtech companies to fudge consent on an internet browser's behalf.
These new guidelines specifically call out the sites that assume a user's agreement to be tracked and targeted based on say, the way they scroll down a webpage, rather than relying on their explicit agreement to that deal. Also called out in the memo are "cookie walls"-a cute name for the not-so-cute tactic where sites bar internet browsers from accessing their content unless they agree to allowing cookies and trackers on the site.
These are both tactics that directly step on the concept of user consent. [...] GDPR was written to require that websites garner a visitor's consent before they handle that visitor's data, and before they pass that data down the garbled supply chain of third parties in the adtech ecosystem. As you might imagine, the GDPR painstakingly lays out exactly what does and doesn't qualify as consent, requiring that, in short, these websites explain the tech used to track the visitors in a clear and upfront way. It also requires that they offer these visitors an easy way to opt in or out of this sort of on-page tech.
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