The muddles from Brussels
The European Parliament’s proposals on cookies are surprising (e-volve November 29) but in character – after all, it’s not long since the EU considered isolating Europe from international trade with its Draft European Data Protection Directive.
The data protection draft, which proposed stopping the flow of personal data to countries that did not have European standards of data protection law, was concocted in the early Nineties. This would have stopped personal data flowing to countries such as the US, which had no data protection standards at all.
The direct response community spotted this and alerted those other sectors, such as financial services, which would have been seriously affected. Together they fought and won the battle to have the proposals recast into today’s more practical arrangements.
Now the European Parliament is threatening to ban the cookie, unless the data subject (you and me) has given express and explicit consent – the so-called “positive option”. If this, for example, merely stopped those nice people at Hotmail making the use of cookies an automatic condition of service, it might be welcomed by those who feel our use of the Internet should be protected against snoopers.
But the European ruling would obviously not extend to countries outside Europe. Residents of those countries would still be able to use cookies without our consent, meaning that while we were protected from snooping by those notionally operating in Europe, we’d be fair game for everyone else.
Non-European businesses would be awarded the enormous data advantage that the use of cookies offers, while European companies would suffer.
In reality, this would not happen because any Internet-reliant company which wanted to compete would merely shift their data-gathering offshore, thus neatly side-stepping this well-meaning but naive European law.
So instead of this unilateral lunacy, it might be a good idea if our diligent but dotty lawmakers opened a dialogue with the rest of the world, agreed acceptable standards, or found a technical method of enforcing their proposals, before they started to issue damaging and unenforceable directives.
Tony Coad
Chairman
CCB
London W1D
