ICO announces 11th hour amendments to cookie law guidance
Employment Law & HR update 29/05/2012
Updated guidance on the new laws governing cookies has been has
been issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The new laws came into effect on 25 May, but the ICO issued the
new guidance at the eleventh hour, just before they were brought
in. The amendments have affected the crucial issue of consent over
the use of cookies.
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that is
downloaded on to your computer when you visit a website and are
used to remember preferences, recording shopping basket contents
and are used by the websites to count visitor traffic.
The new laws, brought in by the EU, required websites to alert
users to the use of cookies and ask their permission. The IOC
amendment, however, has ruled that websites can assume that users
have consented to their use of them. The change has caused relief
among thousands of website operators, who have been struggling to
comply with the directives contained in the new laws since they
were announced a year ago.
An ICO spokesman said, “We’ve stressed that there’s no ‘one size
fits all approach’. We think that organisations themselves are best
placed to develop their own solutions. They will know how and why
their customers use their websites better than we do.”
Stephen Groom, from law firm Osborne Clarke said that it was a
“striking shift”. He explained, “Previously the ICO said that
implied consent would be unlikely to work. Now it says that implied
consent is a valid form of consent.”
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