Cookies – European Court decision provides useful guidance

Cookies are a topic that creates a major headache for companies, because there has been no clear guidance on the requirements applicable to the consent that must be given by users.

In Portugal, the CNPD (Portuguese National Data Protection Commission) has never issued guidelines on this subject. In other EU Member States, there are several sets of guidelines in force, and they often contradict each other. For this reason, we have been expecting specific guidelines from the courts on this issue. 

This guidance has now been given in the Planet 49 judgment in Case no. C 673/17, published on 1 October 2019. In this case, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the consent the user of an Internet site
must provide for cookies to be placed on their equipment cannot be validly given through a pre-checked checkbox that the user has to deselect to refuse consent.