A privacy group has lodged hundreds of complaints against what it calls “cookie banner terror” online.
Noyb, headed by well-known Austrian privacy advocate Max Schrems, is targeting companies which it says deliberately make it hard to opt-out of tracking cookies. “By law, users must be given a clear yes/no option,” the group said. Marketing groups have blamed the EU’s strict privacy rules for creating the problem.
Cookies are used for all sorts of purposes, but one of their major uses is for third-party advertising tracking – which is why ads for a product you may have searched for “follows” you from website to website.
After the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was implemented in 2018, websites began to display very prominent pop-up forms, and some American sites withdrew service to EU users. That also applied to the UK, and was carried over into UK law post-Brexit.
But many websites force users to revoke consent for dozens of marketing partners individually – a process that can take several minutes. Others highlight the “accept all” in a green colour or make it more prominent.
Noyb – an acronym for “none of your business” – says that kind of form is designed to make it “extremely complicated to click anything but the ‘accept’ button”.
Most sites ‘do not comply’
To combat this, the group has created an automated system, which it says can find violations and auto-generate a complaint under GDPR. It claims “most banners do not comply with the requirements of the GDPR”.
Fines can be up to €20m (£17.5m) or 4% of a company’s global revenue, whichever is higher.
Of the 500 pages in its first batch of complaints, 81% had
