26 May 2011 - by
Further to last month's look at the new EU e-Privacy law, yesterday the Information Commissioner's Office announced that website owners would have a year to comply.
On the 25th of May the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announced that organisations and businesses that run websites aimed at UK consumers are being given up to 12 months to comply with the new e-Privacy "cookie" law, which came into force today (26th May 2011).
The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham said the decision has been taken to give businesses time to "put their house in order" and to give browser makers such as Google, Microsoft and Mozilla time to come up with a browser based solution. Mr Graham, addressing advertisers said "It would obviously ruin some users’ browsing experience if they needed to negotiate endless pop ups - and I am not saying that businesses have to go down that road. Browser settings giving individuals more control over cookies will be an important contributor to a solution. But the necessary changes to the technology aren’t there yet."
This common sense approach will be welcomed across the industry, with the hope that technology will provide a solution negating the need for annoying pop up windows.
If you want a glimpse of what the future may hold without a browser solution, just click on the link to the ICO website below. The ICO were aware of the need to comply and have added a permissions based notice at the top of their website. The unsightly notice stays until you accept cookies, and also informs visitors that certain parts of the site will not function correctly if you don't accept, nice!
If you want to know what all the fuss is about, we summarised the main elements of the new legislation for you in our EU Cookies blog article.
Over the next 12 months we'll be monitoring this, putting plans in place and hoping for a solution that lets people easily opt out of certain cookies wthin their browser. Fingers crossed!