With the recent guidance around tracking pixels issued by the OIAC, I find myself chatting to lots of clients about cookie banners.

Cookie banners are meant to achieve two key purposes:

• Provide transparency to the cookies being deployed and the reasons
• Give people a choice as to what cookies they wish to receive.

A review of cookie banner technologies has shown me banner technologies are not built equally. Most of the technologies available allow you to provide a list of your cookies to users and give people buttons to indicate how they wish to have cookies handled. In a lot of cases the listing is automatically produced, and you have to confirm the categorisation.

The key issues I see relate to what happens behind the banner:

• A lot of cookie banners are displayed after or at the same time cookies are deployed to the person’s device. This means that the organisation does not have the relevant consents and also means whatever option the person decides on when engaging with the banner it is already too late as the cookies are deployed.
• A number of organisations have not integrated the cookie banner with their backend technology e.g. Google Tag Manager, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Magento. Therefore, regardless of the consents the person provides they are still deployed every cookie through the backend technology.

In order to ensure you are meeting the expectations of the OIAC you need to deliver on both purposes for the provision of the cookie banner, especially acting on the consents provided by the individual.

If you would like help to check how your banner is operating, please don’t hesitate to reach out.