European Commission Fines Countries for Cookies Law Failures

The EU has started proceedings against five countries for a failure to implement the Cookie Directive into local law in time.  The countries in question are: Belgium, The Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia. Read the press release here.

The actions taken include asking the European Court of Justice to issue fines for every day that each country continues to delay acting local legislation.  The amounts vary, but for The Netherlands it would be over 100,000 euros a day – which is a sum that could quickly pile up.

To put this into perspective a little – this is more than simply the cookie regulations – and in fact The Netherlands has changed its laws in respect of cookies.  The directive contains wide reaching changes for telecoms and online privacy in general – but it is still a significant signal that the EU is not going to let this legislation disappear.

It is also perhaps a bit of a warning – if businesses don’t take online privacy seriously, then the proposed new data protection regulations will really make them sit up.  These draft regulations will potentially place even greater responsibility on business to ensure privacy is respected, and places greater powers in the hands of consumers.  Powers they will surely learn to wield if they believe their privacy concerns are not taken seriously.