The Information Commissioner Warns About New EU Law On Cookies

EU legislation, which will require websites to get consent in order to store or access information on consumers’ computers, is coming into force.

The new law will come into force on 25 May 2011. It will require UK businesses and other organisations to obtain consent from visitors to their websites in order to store on and retrieve usage information from users’ computers.

The most common technique of storing information today is known as cookies. This is a small text file that a website puts on a user’s computer so that it can remember and track consumers’ behavior.

The new law will give people more choice and control over what information businesses and other organisations can store on and access from consumers’ own computers.

Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said: “Once the new regulations are published there will be a major job of education and guidance to be undertaken. In the meantime, both the business community and public sector organisations need to start thinking clearly about how they will meet the requirements of the new Directive.”

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is leading on implementing the new measures in the UK while the ICO will be responsible for regulation.

According to a spokesman from DCMS the details of how companies should roll the guidelines out will not be ready for the deadline. Not only the governments but also the makers of web browsers such as Microsoft and Google have to work on this. Microsoft’s IE 9 browser offers a setting to protect users from cookies. Firefox and Chrome are also working on this area. Many web applications however will simply fail if cookies are blocked and so this is also a major concern for web development and support organisations such as LimeTree.

Although consumers’ awareness of behavioral tracking is low, most people are not happy to be tracked on all their web usage. Many would accept being tracked within a specified site however.

While legislation on this subject will increase transparency on the other hand these changes shouldn’t make using the internet more difficult.