March 12, 2021

EDPB Statement 03/2021 on the ePrivacy Regulation

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) states that the ePrivacy Regulation under no circumstances must lower the level of protection offered by the current ePrivacy Directive and in no way the ePrivacy Regulation can be used to de facto change the GDPR – “Statement 03/2021 on the ePrivacy Regulation

The EDPB stresses the need for:

  • General prohibitions with narrow exceptions for personal data processing

Some exceptions introduced by the Council need to be narrowed down to specific and clearly defined purposes, in order to ensure the highest possible degree of the protection.

  • A privacy preserving approach regarding “take it or leave it” solutions

The ePrivacy Regulation shall include an explicit provision to enshrine a prohibition by which should prevent service providers from using unfair practices such as “take it or leave it” solutions, which makes access to services and functionalities conditional on the consent of a user and therefore, users should be proposed with fair alternatives offered by the same service providers.

  • Audience measurement limited to non-intrusive practices

The derogation for audience measurement should be limited to low level analytics necessary for the analysis of the performance of the service requested by the user and should be solely limited to providing statistics to the service operator and must be put in place by the operator or their processors. Under no circumstances, this processing operation cannot give rise, by itself or in combination with other tracking solutions, to any singling-out or any profiling of users by the provider or other data controllers.

  • Consent for websites and mobile applications

The ePrivacy Regulation should improve the current situation by giving back control to the users and addressing the “consent fatigue”. The ePrivacy should go further and oblige browsers and operating systems to put in place a user friendly and effective mechanism allowing controllers to obtain consent, in order to create a level playing field between all actors.

More information find here https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/edpb/files/files/file1/edpb_statement_032021_eprivacy_regulation_en.pdf