New law in UK prevents cookies without informed consent

Some of you, who have visited BBC, may have noticed a new alert on the top of the screen, which said that they use cookies, and if you continue without changing your settings, BBC will assume that you are happy to receive all cookies from the website. Also, it adds a sentence at the end, that if you don’t want to get cookies from this website, you can change your cookie settings at any time.

This was done due to the new cookie law, which says that websites from United Kingdom can use only the cookies with informed consent for their visitors. It does follow the guidance, which is given by the information Commissioner, who said: “Implied consent has always been a reasonable proposition in the context of data protection law and privacy regulation, and it remains so in the context of storage of information or access to information using cookies and similar devices.”

This new law is far from practice. If you think, the BBC website doesn’t really need the cookies, but sites like Tesco, wouldn’t even function without them. Noticeably, they don’t even have the cookie banner in front page, but it has a link to it’s cookie policy, which has more than 1700 words description. It’s highly unlikely that a user would read such document, but it actually could be seen as the users’ informed consent; however, it would be argued, about the “implied” consent.

The problem is that this law doesn’t provide the right information, and Information Commissioners Officers (ICO’s) attitude towards this law. There will be no automatic enforcement actions taken against the people not complying with this law, but are trying to get there. However, if there will be someone wilfully misleading people – the necessary steps will be taken to ensure that they do comply with this law. Until now, it is enough only to inform the ICO that you will be doing something. It is clear that most od the sites won’t comply with this new rule in time, so that’s why “working to achieve compliance” will work at this time.