The UK arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau will , tomorrow,
launch a campaign against the European Commission’s planned privacy
directive. The campaign will argue in favour of internet cookies.
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.
