Date:
By Jack Marshall, ClickZ, Nov 6, 2009
A revision to EU privacy law could have a crippling effect on the online advertising industry, effectively requiring publishers to gain users' consent before placing cookies on their machines for common online ad practices such as behavioral targeting, retargeting, and audience segmentation.
A proposed amendment to an EU privacy directive states that national governments should "ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his/her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information."
If approved, the amendment would have serious implications for the online advertising industry, much of which relies on the placing of cookies on users' machines to enhance the relevance of online ads. Companies that use cookies for behavioral ad targeting such as Google, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and numerous ad networks, would be forced to gain users' consent before collecting any data on user interactions. Cookies without direct user consent would only be allowed when they are "strictly necessary" to provide a service "explicitly requested" by the user, such as storing shopping cart information on e-commerce sites, for example.
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