The SIGEU Whitepaper on Privacy Compliance

The European Special Interest Group (SIGEU) of the Digital Analytics Association put out a whitepaper on privacy compliance in December. You can get a copy of it here.

It’s an excellent paper. It not only summarizes cookie laws in the EU, but also contains evidence of tracking collapse and the consequences of the interruption caused by the opt-in provision.

This is particularly important.

The HTTP Cookie was invented in 1994. Its original purpose was the measure the proportion of browsers that were first time visitors to a site. It spawned thousands of new inventions. Because that’s what technologists do. That’s what humans do. We use tools and invent new uses for them.

So it went with the cookie. Look at what Amazon used it for in 2000. We’re well beyond that.

It’s been 19 years. And there’s an awful lot of genie to be put back into the bottle.

I believe in the spirit of privacy. I’m really disappointed with what happened with it since. You should too.

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to start steering towards a privacy-first analytical stack.