GDPR Cookies Compliance

So my first question to you guys is why are cookies so important to businesses commercially?

As you know, Annie, everything is online now, right? Like every business has got a website or an app or both that they rely on to run their business.

And every device that we've got, you've got your phone, you've got your tablet, you've got wearables, you've got the laptop, they all connect to the internet and they connect to cookies and they connect to tracking technology and you're on them constantly, you're interacting with them constantly.

One of the statistics that I came across while I was doing this was it's estimated that the average person is generating between 50,000 and 100,000 data points per day.

And globally, we're generating around half a zettabyte of data every single day.

I mean, I've never even heard of a zettabyte.

That's unfathomable amounts of data that we're creating just by clicking on our phones all of the time.

And businesses are thriving from that.

Those data points are really helping businesses to understand what customers want.

and customer behaviour and then using that from a commercial perspective for marketing and advertising and analytics.

So it's just, it's huge for them, but it's also a huge risk because they're getting it quite wrong.

So I can see the commercial benefits of of cookies.

I understand, obviously, why retailers and organizations use them and what the value is for them.

I can understand that and see why this is such a clever tool.

You know, every time you log on to a website and the essential cookies remembers you and and continues to put your information in and load the website so much quicker, that's great.

But ultimately, what what else is it doing with my information? What else does it know about me? What else can it find out about me in terms of my habits? And that's that's the issue, isn't it, Amy?

Yeah, because because so many people and people close to me in my personal life do it.

They just click accept all.

Do you actually know where that data is going, who it's being shared with, what they're using it for, what they're collecting? You've no idea.

And then actually, when they do go to look at it, they don't understand what they're looking at because there's just so much information.

There's hundreds of vendors that they could be sharing that information with.

And so people don't understand it.

And therefore, these companies are getting large scale data collection without any kind of real control on it.

And the issue

is, it's so easy, isn't it, when you log onto a website? just to click accept we all do it i mean we i mean as privacy professionals we read we like no i don't think we're going to be clicking that we know what you're doing we're harvesting all our information but i would imagine if you spoke to 99 of people they just click accept right because that's what you do and they don't really know what they're agreeing to because a lot of these cookie banners are so simple you know we're collecting information about you click accept oh okay Well, what are you collecting about me? What are you doing with it? Where does it go? How long