Webpages Contain 14 Cookies Each

UK webpages contain on average 14 tracking cookies each, the majority of which come from third-parties.

This means that a typical user will get between 112 to 140 trackers chucked on their machine during an average session on a website, with only 32 percent of cookies operated by the website owners themselves.

Businesses ‘asleep at the wheel’

The research from privacy tech provider TRUSTe comes just over a month before the EU e-Privacy Directive is enforced in the UK, requiring website owners to get consent from users before installing cookies on their machines.

Businesses are being urged to get in line with the law, which comes into force on 26 May, yet KPMG research recently showed that 95 percent of UK businesses were not cookie law compliant.

” Far too many organisations are asleep at the wheel,” Stewart Room, partner in Field Fisher Waterhouse’s Privacy and Information Law Group , told TechWeekEurope. “This means that they will have a difficult time explaining themselves if they’re on the receiving end of a regulatory investigation.”

“Here are some tips for those organisations who have not tackled compliance: first, identify your cookies usage and the intrusiveness of them; second, work out which are truly necessary for your business and then ditch the ones that aren’t; third, write a compliance route map, so that you’ve got something in your back pocket, in case you get into trouble.”

Room said companies should not panic, however. “The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is not likely to take strong enforcement action if they recognise that you are meaning to get your act together.”

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