The Cookie law is changing again!

The ICO have new advice! 

The ICO have announced a new update to their advice. The new advice is now that simply requesting a website would constitute implied consent - removing all together the need for explicit consent. This is a bit confusing as the new law states that explicit consent is required for all non-essential cookies . This appears to be a bit of a back-down on the behalf of the ICO, perhaps it's because of the lack of conformity from some of the online giants, whatever the reason for this - we think it's a good move!

The new advice is now as follows:

1. Implied consent should be good enough if the cookies in question are unobtrusive enough and documented in a privacy policy or similar.
2. Implied consent probably wouldn't be good enough for more intrusive cookies, like the third party cookies set by behavioural advertisers. 

The grey area still is that Google Analytics is a third-party cookie that could be considered as being among the most intrusive on the web. However we don't believe the ICO are overly concerned with Google Analytics. We think the lawyers from Google will sort something out with the ICO and agree a path forward that will ultimately not affect users overly. Could this advice change again - Yes! It seems that this new interpretation of the new EU cookie directive seems to be more feasible, however it seems that things can change as often as the weather at the ICO.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this?