The UK arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) will, tomorrow, launch a campaign against the European Commission’s planned privacy directive. The campaign will argue in favour of internet cookies, small data files that a web site puts on your hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time.
The benefits of cookies, says the IAB, outweigh any privacy issues. Cookies are beneficial, they argue, because they mean that sites are free to access and are paid for by advertising. The campaign has been sparked by the proposed European privacy directive which the IAB fears will outlaw web cookies. This, says the IAB, would lead to a loss of £187 million for British companies. The privacy concern surrounding cookies is that they may store data without the user’s explicit approval and is encapsulated in an amendment to the privacy directive which states that cookies “may seriously intrude on the privacy of users. The use of such devices should therefore be prohibited unless the explicit, well-informed and freely given consent of the users concerned has been obtained.”
There are now just two weeks left to run of the consultation period on the privacy directive.