Responsibility for providing the information and
obtaining consent
The Regulations do not define exactly and clearly who should be responsible for providing the
information and obtaining the consent. However, you are responsible for complying with these
regulations if you operate an online service or website and it requires any use of a cookie type
device for your purposes only.
However, once a person has used such a device to store or access data on a device, that person will
not be required to provide the information described and obtain consent on subsequent occasions,
as long as they met these requirements initially. While the regulations do not require the relevant
information to be provided on each occasion, they do not prevent this.
So, what do you need to do to inform consumers?
Basically, if you are using cookies on your website you will most likely need to make some changes.
You MUST inform your customers, but how you do this can be in a variety of ways. We recommend
that for the time-being you follow some or all of the following:
• Tell visitors to your website that the cookies are there
• Explain the purpose of these cookies
• Get the customer’s consent to store a cookie on their device
The Regulations are not entirely rigid about the information that you need to provide consumers
with, but the text should be sufficiently full and intelligible to allow individuals to clearly understand
the potential consequences of allowing storage and access to the information collected by the
device should they wish to do so.
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