Updates to EU Banners

The regulatory landscape continues to shift as countries all over the globe continue to enact privacy laws. At the same time, regulators continue to issue guidance on how to best comply with the privacy rules those laws charge them with enforcing. 

Cookies, in particular, is a legal area that’s constantly in flux. Frequently, the debate is over when websites should be allowed to deploy tracking cookies on a website and for which purposes. Most importantly, how should websites deploying cookies communicate to end-users what’s happening with their data when they visit that site? That conversation is still evolving. 

The General Data Protection Regulation and the ePrivacy Directive are the governing laws here. But as companies experiment with different methods and designs to obtain consent to deploy cookies, regulators are getting more specific on rules for what the user interface should look like — at a minimum — to avoid regulatory scrutiny. 

Osano’s Consent Manager automatically displays a compliance pop-up to each end-user based on their geo-targeted location. Recently, EU regulators’ trending guidance indicates they want it to be as easy for an end-user to click “reject all” cookies as clicking “accept all.” And the Italian Data Protection Authority (known as the Garante) issued a requirement that goes a step further. The Garante has called for the presence of an “X” button within the cookie banner to symbolize the end-users’ ability to reject all but essential cookies.  

To ensure Osano customers can meet these new guidelines, the following will be added to the default banner experience in Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.K.:

• An “X” allowing end-users to reject all tracking cookies. 
• A “Reject All” button. 
• A “Storage Preferences” link on the cookie banner’s first layer.

Here is what the Consent Banner for these countries looked like before:

Here's what it looks like now: 

Why does this matter?

Adding “Reject All” and an “X” to the consent banner in these EU jurisdictions and the U.K. positions Osano customers as compliant with the most recent compliance guidance from regulators. And including a link to more granular information about cookie deployment allows the privacy-focused end user to make a more informed decision on consent. 

Important: For customers using custom CSS to override the default banner experiences, we recommend testing this update on a staging site before publishing it to your production site to ensure there is no visual impact on your banner display.