Why "consent"?

In Europe, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive (and the upcoming ePrivacy Regulation) are the most important data protection regulations. In many other regions of the world, similar laws and directives are being planned or enacted that are based on similar rules.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development provides an overview of the existing and planned rules. Data protection laws already exist in 71% of all countries, and concrete drafts are available in a further 9%.

Aims of Consent

The main objectives are as follows:

• User's data is not passed on to third parties without consent.
• Tracking only takes place after consent.
• No changes are made to the browser (cookies, local storage, session storage) without consent.

These consents can be obtained, managed and stored with Klaro.

Some Notes on Cookies

In the European Union (and possibly also in other countries), changes in the user's browser (such as the setting of cookies, sessionStorage or localStorage) may only be made with the user's consent or are strictly necessary for the provision of the requested service.

The ePrivacy Directive Art. 5 (3) says, that you need users’ consent before you "store information" (cookies, localStorage etc.) "in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user" (e.g. browser) except "strictly necessary" data. This EU directive is not a direct law, but is implemented by national laws, in Germany the TDDDG and in Spain the LSSI for example. The same regulations exist in the UK, see PECR

The new EU e-Privacy Regulation is currently being drafted; this will replace the directive and will then become direct law (in the same way as the GDPR). According to the current status, it contains an analogous passage, see Article 8 "Protection of information stored in and related to end-users’ terminal equipment":

It is not about which data is processed, but about the protection of the visitor's end device - so it does not matter whether it is a tracking, 1st or 3rd party cookie or whether personal data is stored or not.