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Stéphanie Abdesselam

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After Germany became the last EU member state to transpose Article 5(3) of the Directive 2002/58/EC, amended by Directive 2009/136/EC (ePrivacy Directive) into national law, the use of cookies in the EU must meet one of the following requirements:

  • The user’s consent, or
  • The cookie must be strictly necessary in order to provide the service explicitly requested by the user (Strictly Necessary Cookies).

The category of Strictly Necessary Cookies was previously interpreted rather narrowly. There must be a clear link between the strict necessity of the cookie and the delivery of the service. It is not sufficient that the cookie is merely necessary from an economic perspective to run a website. The Article 29 Working Party in WP194 regarded shopping cart, user authentication, security, load balancing, or multimedia player as use cases for Strictly Necessary Cookies.

The legal basis for so-called Reach Measurement Cookies has been heavily debated. Reach Measurement Cookies are statistical audience measurement tools for websites used to estimate the number of unique users, track the users’ interaction with the website and track down navigation issues. Typically, they have not been regarded as Strictly Necessary Cookies because websites can be provided to the users without measuring the users’ interactions with the websites. At the same time, Reach Measurement Cookies only provide useful findings if every users’ interactions with the websites are tracked.

In this context, the French data protection authority (CNIL) has provided guidelines (Guidelines) under which the Reach Measurement Cookies may be considered as Strictly Necessary Cookies and thus benefit from the consent exemption.Continue Reading When are Reach Measurement Cookies exempt from the consent requirement?

On March 12, 2021, the French Council of State (Conseil d’Etat), the highest French administrative court, handed down a ruling (ordonnance des référés) allowing Doctolib, a company in charge of booking COVID-19 vaccination appointments, to rely on a U.S.-based health data host.

In the present case, the servers of Doctolib – whose platform had been entrusted by the French government for booking COVID-19 vaccinations – were hosted by the Luxembourg subsidiary of AWS, a U.S. company. Specifically, in this case, the AWS data was stored in data centers located in the European Union (specifically, in France and Germany).

The French government’s decision to use a platform hosted by the subsidiary of a U.S.-based company raised significant concerns among French associations and trade unions because of the Schrems II decision rendered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU July 16, 2020, Case C-311/18, Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Ltd. and Maximilian Schrems), which shed light on the risks that U.S. surveillance laws might pose to data subjects in the event of access requests by U.S. agencies.
Continue Reading Aftermath of Schrems II decision in France: The French Council of State provides significant clarification on the U.S. based data host to provide services in the French health care sector

The French data protection authority (CNIL) rendered three major decisions impacting worldwide online service providers following online controls and investigations performed on the companies’ websites. These decisions highlight the obligations of data controllers when using cookies and other trackers, notably regarding the way the user’s consent shall be collected, and the level of information that…

Companies have been challenged with respect to their cookie policies and their implementation due to the entry into force of the GDPR earlier than the proposed ePrivacy Regulation

 Given the delay in the adoption of an EU-wide regulation on e-privacy, national data protection authorities have taken the initiative in publishing guidelines on cookies requirements. The…