STRASBOURG, FRANCE — Members of the European Parliament are expected to vote by June on a proposal requiring websites to obtain permission from users before setting cookies on their computers.Proposed by Alexander Alvaro, Germany’s representative to the European Parliament, Amendment 84 is positioned as an effort to safeguard Web surfers’ privacy. The measure, which would impact both commercial and non-commercial websites, faces heavy fire from internet publishers who fear the rule could disrupt traffic and hamstring online advertising and affiliate networks.
The Internet Advertising Bureau’s European arm has urged the EU to reject the amendment.
“This amendment, if adopted, risks changing the way the internet works today,” Kimon Zorbas, vice president of the IAB Europe, told ClickZ.com. “The information provided in the types of notices proposed [by the amendment] can typically be found in website privacy policies, which are already required by law.”
IAB Europe President Alain Heureux said his concerns go even deeper: EU member states could misinterpret the rule and return the Web to the days when pop-up notices interrupted Web surfers with alarming frequency. In addition, by providing blanket consent for cookie setting, users might be giving up more privacy than they protected.
“For the consumer, we argue that this is bad, and unrealistic for the functionality of the internet,” Heureux told ClickZ. “The amendment would need to be extremely clear. There is a danger that this could be interpreted in a dangerous way.”
The IAB’s U.K. branch recently published best-practices guidelines for the use of behavioral targeting in advertising, one of the purposes for which cookies are used. The electronic information storage units also are used to store user preferences like language and site layout, as well as login identification.
“[Alexander Alvaro] has not provided any evidence that there are problems with the way cookies function today,” Zorbas told ClickZ. “Mr. Alvaro is disregarding the fact that today’s technologies provide users with the means to manage cookies through refusal, defined acceptance and deletion.”
