BayLDA (Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision) starts testing for cookie banners and consent management
One or two companies based in Bavaria have already received mail from the BayLDA. Background: In a first round of testing the legal compliance of cookie banners and consent management, the BayLDA found concrete reasons for objecting to their implementation in 350 companies. The BayLDA disliked, among other things, that
Processes relating to cookies and data transfer are already set in motion as soon as the website is accessed, even before the visitor is interacted with with regard to the necessary consent (consent management) (§ 25 TTDSG) and at the first level in consent management there is rarely a simple option for the visitor to refuse (non-consent) or, in the BayLDA’s view, the absence of which does not constitute legally valid consent in the sense of 25 Abs. 1 S. 2 TTDSG as well as Art. 6 Paragraph 1 Letter a GDPR is present.
“Despite the now clearly stipulated legal requirement for consent for access to end devices, for example the setting of cookies or the reading of advertising IDs and other identifiers, we continue to receive a very high number of complaints and control suggestions in this area.”says the BayLDA about the motivation for this unfounded test campaign.
In the course of this, apps and their behavior were also examined in the above. Context checked. In contrast to the automated check of the implementation on websites, the app check according to BayLDA is significantly more complex.
“The test is initially based on the use of a very common consent management platform (CMP), but will be expanded in further rounds to include other CMP providers and thus an even larger number of websites.”writes the BayLDA in its Pressemitteilung from February 9th, 2024. So if you are a company, freelancer or association based in Bavaria that has not yet been included in the 350 complaints so far, you have a good chance of still receiving mail from the BayLDA in the future.
Requirements for responsible bodies as well as results from this test campaign are successively presented in section “Datenschutzprüfungen” published on the BayLDA website. It’s worth taking a look.
By the way, if you would like to find out something about cookies on our website, please go here.