Starting from April 2021, all French websites and mobile apps should comply with the amending guidelines on cookies and other cookies of October 2020 published by the French Data Protection Authority the “CNIL”.
Let’s go back a little bit in time to know what are these new guidelines about.
On October 1, 2020, the “CNIL” published newly revised guidelines on cookies and similar technologies. These guidelines were taking into consideration the provisions of the European Union’s GDPR consent requirements.
The major key takeaways of these guidelines are:
1) Pursuing navigation on a website can no longer be considered as a valid expression of the user’s consent.
2) The user must consent to a deposit of a cookie by an open and clear act such as “ I accept” in a cookie pop-up. If the user does not do so, then no cookie that is not essential to the operation of the service can be placed on their device.
3) Users should be able to withdraw their consent easily and at any time.
4) Refusing cookies should be as easy as accepting them.
5) Users must be clearly informed of the purposes of the cookies before consenting, as well as the consequences that attach to an acceptance or rejection of cookies;
6) Users must also be informed of the identity of all actors using cookies subject to consent.
7) Organizations operating cookies must be able to provide, at any time, proof of valid collection of the free, informed specific and unambiguous consent of the user.
While these are the clear guidelines that all organizations should respect to obtain users’ consent to access or store their data. There are some cookies that are exempted from consent collection, such as the ones intended for authentification with a service, or the ones to keep in memory the contents of a shopping cart on a merchant site.
Moreover, the CNIL emphasized that analytics cookies can be exempt if their use is essential to the proper functioning of the service and must provide anonymous data that are exclusive to the website or the mobile app.
To respect the guidelines above, The CNIL recommends that the consent collection banner should:
1) Not only include “Agree to all” but “ Disagree to all ” as well, in order to give to the user in an easy and clear way the option to either accept or refuse the cookies collection.
2) Give the users the opportunity to understand the purposes of all the cookies as well as the consequences of accepting or refusing the cookies
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These purposes are the most common among all websites, and they illustrate why the cookies are being collected. This recommendation comes to make the collection as transparent and flexible as possible.
3) Include the list of partners using the cookies subject to the consent and give the option to the users whether to accept or not.
The CNIL decided to allow for a transition period of six months to comply with the Guidelines (until March 31, 2021), announcing that after this date, it will show no leniency towards the organizations that don’t comply with these guidelines, since the compliance with the rules applicable to cookies will be one of its priority control themes in 2021.
We can see that the advertisers are not universally welcoming these new guidelines with open arms since they give users the opportunity to control the different types of information that can be collected, and that makes it almost impossible to track a fair percentage of users.
To reduce the damage, advertisers thought about a way of the interface display, suggested by the CNIL itself in its recommendation last October. Instead of a “Disagree to all” button next to “Agree to all”, the Internet user can express his refusal by a simple link “Continue without accepting” at the top of the window — therefore neither in the same place nor in the form of a button — this was considered a good alternative by advertisers, who verified that this was, at this stage, the best way to maximize the acceptance rate.
Today, while the battle is not over yet, many advertisers wonder how can they track the users who will be refusing the cookies, some of them think of “the messaging walls” that will display large banners with long messages about the role of cookies financing content through advertising, which can annoy readers and push them to subscribe. Another possibility is to set up “the cookies wall” that prevents or limits access to all content unless the user agrees on the cookies collection. The CNIL had wanted to ban this practice She now says she is studying the situation “on a case-by-case basis”.
Another way to reduce the damage caused by the impossibility to set up targeted campaign ads, many companies are thinking of making the users pay to access their content if they refuse to give their consent to share cookies like “marmiton” who proposes a subscription of one month to the website if the user doesn’t share its data with the company.
So are customers willing to pay to access content that is free now? We shall not forget that when the product is free, we are the product.
Other businesses think about operating in a way that provides a clear value exchange to consumers in the long term, like offering personalized discounts where a consumer believes that required action like sharing his data would be a fair trade for a discount on the product/service. Another way to offer a value exchange would be to provide a differentiated and improved experience where the consumer gets a desirable bonus for sharing his data (e.g, loyalty programs) that feel unique and enhanced.
Many options are available for companies to get the consumer share data, however, every company needs to take a step back and look at how much data they actually need to deliver relevant and personalized experiences, and keep in mind that the consumers will always be empowered to drive how and where they engage with businesses. Consequently, proactive strategies to retain customers, predict and avoid churn, are likely to rise on management lists.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
