Data Protection – Updated 2024

Published by New Media Marketing on

A cookie is a file that is downloaded to computers when the user accesses a specific web page. This file allows, among others, to store and retrieve information about the browsing habits or preferences of the user who has entered the website. Depending on the information collected, it is possible to recognize the user.

Thus, as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) indicates, when information allows us to identify a person, this information must be considered for all purposes as personal data.

In February 2023, the European Data Protection Board published Guidelines 03/2022 on deceptive design patterns in social networks with the aim of providing concrete and effective criteria to detect and avoid interfaces that seek to influence users to make involuntary decisions. , unwanted or even potentially harmful and against your interests.

These guidelines have incorporated, among others, a series of new features that the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) has included in the Guide on the use of cookies:

· The actions to accept or reject cookies that can be activated on the website once the user accesses them must be presented in a prominent place and format. Both actions must be at the same level, without it being more complicated to reject them than to accept them. The guide includes new examples of how these options should be displayed, offering guidance on, among other things, the color, size, and location in which they appear.
· In the consent of certain personalization cookies when the user himself makes decisions about them (for example, choosing the language of the website or the currency in which he wishes to carry out transactions), these are technical cookies that do not require consent, without that can be used for other purposes. However, when it is the editor that makes this type of decision about personalization cookies based on the information obtained from the user, it must inform about it, prominently offering the option to accept or reject them. In this case, the editor could not use them for other purposes either.
· And on cookie walls: the previous guide already specified that for consent to be considered freely given, access to the service and its functionalities could not be conditional on the user agreeing to the use of cookies. Therefore, there could be cases in which non-acceptance of the use of cookies prevented access to the website or total or partial use of the service, provided that the user was informed and the editor offered an alternative access to the service. service without having to accept the use of cookies. The new version of the guide clarifies that this alternative will not necessarily have to be free.

The European Data Protection Board has announced that these new criteria must be implemented no later than January 11, 2024.

Categories: RGPD