Basically EU wanted sites to obtain consent to use users' cookies (and for the users to give/take away that consent). However, pretty much all the sites just decided to provide you with a banner saying something like "if you're using this site you agree to our cookie policy". Therefore the law became ineffective and just a nuisance to the users.
This notion of "implied consent" is being actively fought with GDPR. You have to provide explicit consent to the usage of your data. And more importantly you can revoke it (at any point) and the site can't deny or degrade the service (unless the data is strictly necessary for a specific action related to the service).
With ePrivacy this will go one step further. Right now you only need to provide opt-out, which means most people will likely leave it as it. Going forward those additional services (marketing purposes, ad tracking) will need to be strictly opt-in (and there's already internal research done in some companies showing that marketing/ad opt-in rates will be 10-12% at best).
Furthermore, if I remember correctly, no explicit consent is required where the cookie has to be used for features the user requested, like a shopping cart.
So, if the law was actually written to require what it was supposed to require, and actually enforced, a web site operator would have the options to either:
a) implement an opt-out globally across the entire site to ensure no part sets a cookie and doesn't track them, with a high risk if you get it wrong, annoy every visitor with a modal yes/no before letting them onto the site (which would hurt your conversion rates etc.), where the "no" would be a meaningful choice that would still let them use your site, and there would be very little incentive for the user to click yes
b) stop tracking users unnecessarily in general
As it is written, the options are:
a) implement an opt-out globally across the entire site to ensure that no part sets a cookie and doesn't track the users, with a high risk if you get it wrong
b) slap an annoying banner on your web site
One of these options is significantly less work and allows you to keep tracking users, so guess what gets done.
From what I understand, the GDPR also disallows denying users access to a site if they don't consent to an unrelated data collection.
Before accessing the website, you get a choice between yes and no.
If you select no, the site will not do any tracking, no analytics — some sites disable ads in that case entirely. You still get to access the site.
If you select yes, you getthe tracking.
I have history turned off in google maps. I can’t name the points I make, it tells me I need to turn history and tracking back on. I hope that becomes an unjustifiable degrade.
GDPR extends this concept also to consent for processing private data - there are some ways how that consent can be granted and received, but contracts of adhesion are not (will not be when GDPR comes in force) one of them. In particular, GDPR specifies that anything included in such a "take it or leave it" contract is not considered "freely given" consent and thus such a contract does not and can not give you any rights to use that data, no matter what is written there.
There is currently no detailed description as to what the definition of "sufficiently" is. For example:
- can I use your data to build a targeting machine learning model?
- can I use it to target you?
- do I need specific opt-in for every model?
Most things in GDPR are not specified in order to both give flexibility to the sites and to reduce the number of loopholes (which are technically legal but against the spirit of the law). You need to decide on the implementation and be ready to defend it in case of an audit.
Not true. There are some countries where it works like this, but also countries where it's the opposite. In some EU countries this got ruled as unconstitutional. In some other countries, this got ruled by the highest court of law as unlawful.
> This is a corporate regulation, not a criminal case.
That doesn't matter in most EU countries.
Until you prove otherwise, by means of contract, legitimate business interest, law or consent, assume private data is meant to remain private.
You could see the cookie law as a gentle request for Internet businesses to self-regulate and limit unnecessary tracking. It didn't work (I don't know of any case when businesses decided to self-regulate themselves out of potential extra profit), so now GDPR is meant to force companies to stop their user-hostile data abuse.
Hello. I have moral objections to excessive tracking, and none of my businesses use things like retargeting based on tracking pixels, even though this would almost certainly improve the conversion rates for our online ads significantly.
There, now you've seen a case where a business self-regulated out of potential extra profit in exactly this area. :-)
Sad you don't link to your businesses in your profile; now that you made me want to check them out and maybe reward with money.