DATA PROTECTION/INTERNET : KROES WARNS AGAINST "WATERING DOWN" DO NOT TRACK' STANDARD.

Having been patient for a year now, the Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, is at the end of her tether: the member states and online companies active in the EU have still not activated the international standard do not track' (DNT) in the Union. The DNT allows internet users to tell web applications that they do not want to be tracked by advertisers or other marketing companies. "Let me be frank: standardisation work is not going according to plan. In fact, I am increasingly concerned. About the delay, and about the turn taken by the discussions hosted by the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C, an international standardisation body, which is drawing up the DNT - Ed]," Kroes said at an event organised, on 11 October, by Brussels-based think tank Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). "I know that my colleagues across the Atlantic, at the Federal Trade Commission, feel the same," Kroes added.

What is the problem? "Top of my list comes the watering down of the standard," the commissioner said, without directly accusing advertisers and marketing companies - which would be far from thrilled from users blocking the use of their data while they are connected to the internet.

The Commission does not have the means to impose DNT. But, in its view, the DNT is the standard most apt to help the application of the online privacy directive (e-privacy, 2009/136/EC) amended within the telecoms package - the rules of which have been introduced in nearly all the member states. The member states are responsible for the enforcement on the field.

COOKIES DIRECTIVE'

Thus the cookies directive' (which, in particular, allows web browsers to store private data about a user's most frequently visited websites, for example), requires informed consent from the user before anything is stored on his computer or smartphone - including when this stored information is used by advertisers. Indeed, as the commissioner recalled, it is not so much advertising that is problematic for web users as...