Cookie Pledge: EU admits that cookie banners are annoying, suggests remedy

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The European Union plans to make changes to the "cookie law" that it introduced several years ago to give its citizen more control over tracking and advertising on the Internet.

While it helped improve online privacy to a degree, it also introduced cookie banners on more or less every website. These banners are displayed when users visit a site for the first time, or after they have cleared cookies in their browser, or use a different browser.

Even before the law took affect, critics argued that it would lead to cookie banner fatigue. Users who want to access a site's content are often annoyed by the banners. A good part of users looks for the easiest option to do away with the banner, and that is usually the "accept" option.

Webmasters too would feel the pressure of the law. They had to implement a solution. Since there was no standard, lots of solutions were created to display these banners to visitors of the site.

Now, the EU is considering altering the regulation to make it less annoying to users. EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders commented on the plans in an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (which, by the way has only accept all or subscribe options for users in its cookie banner): "According to the law, cookies cannot be used to process personal data without the express consent of the user. However, this does not mean that surfing the web can end up being a nuisance"

The EU considers altering the system to a "cookie pledge" system. Self-commitment of large platforms is key, according to Reynders. These large platforms pledge that they will offer better information to their users about the use of cookies. In return, they are no longer required to get consent using cookie banners.
Internet users should be able to access information about how an organization or website uses personal data, especially for tracking, advertisement and the financing of the service.

Reynders hopes that smaller publishers will follow the lead of the larger platforms to put an end to cookie banners on the Internet.

The EU also wants to reduce the number of cookie banners that users see on individual sites. A key idea is to show a cookie banner only once per year to the user.
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