The UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.
We received 210 concerns about cookies via our website in the previous financial year (April 2015 to March 2016). In that period we received 161,186 concerns about nuisance calls, text messages and emails. It is important to note that many of the concerns we received about cookies did not relate to individual sites or provide any information about specific instances of non-compliance.
Our approach is to focus on sites that are doing nothing to raise awareness of cookies, or get their users’ consent, particularly those visited most in the UK. However, we have maintained a consumer threat level of ‘low’ in this area due to the very low levels of concerns reported by members of the public.
When consumers raise their concerns with us, we either conduct our own compliance check or write to the organisation concerned asking for an explanation about their compliance. We have written to 371 organisations since October 2012 (as of 13 May 2016), specifically about compliance with the cookie rules.
We recently conducted a Sweep of cookie use on mobile devices and we will publish findings on our website shortly. On the back of this we have contacted 16 organisations specifically in relation to the mobile versions of their website.
We published the above information on 18 May 2016.