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Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?
Published Jun 09, 2022 — last updated Jan 20, 2025 In recent years there’s been a bit of a push for “privacy-aware analytics”, a group of web analytics solutions that claim to do analytics without any of the morally dubious tracking the industry has otherwise been known for. In addition to putting a lot of effort into not tracking individual users, their primary claim to fame is that they say they don’t need cookie banners.
For example, this is the case for cookies, where the accessing entity instructs the terminal equipment to proactively send information on each subsequent Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) call. It doesn’t matter what kind of hashing or anonymization the analytics engine is doing, neither before nor after the information leaves the terminal equipment: the simple act of accessing it is enough to require consent under the ePD. […] In this regard, should article 5.3 of the Directive 2002/58/EC be re-visited in the future, the European legislator might appropriately add a third exemption criterion to consent for cookies that are strictly limited to first party anonymized and aggregated statistical purposes.
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