In a decision by the Belgian data protection authority ADP on the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (IAB Europe), the authority found violations of the important standard in online advertising against the GDPR.
The advertising association must now delete all personal data collected in this way and pay a fine of 250,000 euros.
One of the detected violations is related to the so-called TC strings. These are created by the TCF when users give their consent for cookies or do not object to a legitimate interest and contain the selection of users. The TC string is the basis for individual profiles but does not contain any personal data.
According to ADP, however, the TC string in combination with the cookie set by the respective consent management platform (euconsent-v2) can be linked to the IP address of the users. This would make the originator of the selection identifiable, and thus there would be no legal basis for the processing of the TC string.
Borlabs Cookie Update introduces changes for UID
Due to the decision of the Belgian authority, we introduce a change for UIDs. The UID is an ID that is randomly generated after consent in the Cookie Box and stored in the cookie borlabs-cookie. According to the ADP decision, the UID could be considered as personal data.
From now on, no UID will be generated when selecting the cookie group Essential cookies. When selecting other cookie groups, a UID will still be generated. This can lead to slight distortions in the statistics displayed in the Dashboard in special cases.
Independently of this, the display of the statistics has also been revised: From now on, the statistics show the approvals of the last 30 days, instead of the last 10,000 approvals as before.
New layout: Box - Plus
Besides the change in the UID system, the new update also brings a preventive improvement to the Cookie Box.
Even though there are different opinions in different data protection authorities in Europe so far, we expect that in the future information about the cookie groups will have to be displayed in the Cookie Box. For example, in the decision on the TCF, the ADP criticized "generic and vague" information in the interface of the consent management platforms.
Our new Cookie Box layout will therefore display more information about each cookie group from now on.
Opt-out reloads page
Borlabs Cookie offers visitors a simple opt-out solution. However, until now, opting out does not immediately reload the web page - existing tracking, therefore, continues until reloaded by visitor interaction.
From now on, after an opt-out, the page is automatically reloaded, so visitors are no longer tracked.
Borlabs Cookie brings widget for quick access
With the new update, we introduce the first version of our widget. The widget provides visitors with quick access to advanced cookie settings.
The widget is permanently visible on the website when activated. The color and position of the widget can be adjusted, but the icon itself cannot be changed at the moment. A corresponding function is planned for a later date.