Combining the words website and £500,000 fine in a sentence is usually enough to make most people in travel sit up and take notice.
And so it was during Travel Republic's Elliott Pritchard's session on cookies and UK law at TTI earlier this week.
Many European states are still drafting their approach following the amendment to the EU e-Privacy Directive (current status charts via Field Fisher Waterhousehere).
However, in the UK it has been law for a year and will be to be enforced from May 26, 2012.
What it says is online service providers have to get consent from website visitors before putting anything that resembles a cookie or similar tracking mechanism on people's computers.
The Information Commissioner's Office has the job of enforcing the legislation and there are very few 'get out of jail free' cards says Pritchard.
It seems the ICO has already raised the red flag on the three examples, he shared, of where travel websites might think they're off the hook:
- Implied consent - assuming consumers are consenting
- Browser settings - the thinking is that as they currently exist they don't do a good enough job
- Strict necessity - narrow view being taken of examples where you have to use cookies to make a part of the website work such as shopping basket
Interestingly, when the ICO put a cookie consent message on its website, it was immediately able to track significantly fewer visitors.
The issues around the legislation for travel websites are many -
- the more intrusive, the greater the consent needed
- analytics are not excluded
- prior consent has to be gained where possible
- if a computer has multi-users it's impossible to separate them
The one glimmer of light seems to be that Department of Culture, Media and Sport has said in
an open letter that it's intending a light approach to the legislation.
In the US, a Bill of Rights on the issue was introduced last year.
One final word is that although mobile browsers such as Safari don't accept third party cookies, mobile devices have their own tracking techniques as per this article.
NB: Image via Shutterstock
NB2: Hat-tip to Eliliott Pritchard for doing his homework - full presentation here.