European Commission Weighs Taking Down Cookie Consent Banners on Websites

“Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users,” Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman told Politico Europe.

Cookie technology is a focal point of the Commission’s plan to simplify tech-regs within the 27-member bloc. Per Politico, it held a meeting Monday with tech-industry leaders to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners. The Commission plans to introduce an “omnibus” package of proposals in December to scrap rules identified as overly burdensome on tech companies.

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According to a note sent to industry and civil society groups September 15 seen by Politico, the Commission is examining how to tweak the rules to include more exceptions or make sure users can set their preferences on cookies once, perhaps in their browser settings, instead of every time they visit a website.

Denmark, which currently holds the chair of the European Council, proposed in May getting rid of consent banners for technical necessary cookies or to collect basic statistics, but leaving them in place for more intrusive uses such as advertising and marketing. Other ideas for simplifying the cookie rules were floated in 2017, but were withdrawn after stakeholders and EU institutions were unable to reach a compromise.

Read more: SAP Offers Concessions to Ease EU Antitrust Concerns

The latest proposals to tweak the e-Privacy Directive nonetheless could trigger a fierce lobbying campaign by industry groups. The groups are advocating moving cookie consent out of the Directive altogether and shifting it to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which they argue would allow for a more flexible, risk-based approach.

The e-Privacy Directive takes a “very rigid” view on consent and that rules could be simplified by moving cookie regulation to the GDPR, Franck Thomas, policy director at advertisers’ lobby IAB Europe told Politico. “Everyone agrees we need to maintain this balance between safeguarding privacy rights and preserving the competitiveness of the European tech industry,” he said.

Some civil society groups are wary of the whole project, however. “Focusing on cookies is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, the ship being surveillance advertising,” said Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, policy adviser at European Digital Rights. She noted that the law already includes exceptions for cookies required to deliver a service consumers expect, such as remembering items in a shopping cart. But, she added, “expanding that category to include [other kinds of] ‘essential’ tracking is misleading, because it risks smuggling in analytics or personalization for adtech.”