Advertising Association lobbies for cookie rights

Amendments were recently tabled by Mr Van Velzen MEP to a proposed Directive “concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector”. The AA points out that the significance of these amendments has been overlooked due to the controversy raised in arguments over how to deal with e-mail and SMS marketing. According to Andrew Brown, Director-General of the AA, “the European Commission is inclined to accept these amendments.” If implemented, he warns that they will damage the UK’s £17 billion advertising industry.

The AA is a federation of 24 trade associations and professional bodies representing advertisers, agencies, the media and support services in the UK. In its letter to Mr Alexander it has criticised Mr Van Velzen for creating fear and prejudice against cookies by wrongly describing them as “spyware”.

Basically, a cookie is a small file which a web site puts on your computer’s hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time. It can be used to record a user’s site preferences or to rotate the banner ads that the user sees on one or more web sites. Some argue that cookies are an invasion of privacy, which can be true if they are not used responsibly. However, the user can reject cookies at any time by changing his browser settings and deleting existing cookie files from his hard disk, and when used properly, they can enhance the user’s experience in using the internet.

Mr Van Velzen has proposed that cookies should require explicit, prior consent from users. However, in the letter to Mr Alexander, the AA makes the following points:

• Users would be very irritated if they had to remember all their passwords and usernames and if they had to re-register at sites on every visit.
• On-line advertising would be less effective if advertisers could not track the effectiveness of their campaigns or ensure that users did not see the same advert over and over again. If European sites lost advertising revenue for this reason, users would instead visit US sites.
• Re-designing sites to comply with such a requirement would be expensive.

The AA is calling for the Commission to reject the proposed amendments and instead address them in a review of the general Data Protection Directive, scheduled for later this year.

The AA adds in its appeal to Mr Alexander, in arguing against a change to the current position:

“The industry is dealing with the use of cookies, both through self regulation and through compliance with the Data Protection legislation. Any user can set their browser to refuse cookies, or accept some and not others. The moment at which cookie data is likely to be processed with personally identifiable data, users are offered the opportunity to opt-out or in (depending on the circumstances and the Member State concerned).”