My Lords, in moving Amendment 199, I will also speak to the other amendments in this group. In so doing, I declare an interest as the principal proprietor of the Good Schools Guide; we make a lot of use of cookies on our website.
I am completely in favour of what the Government are doing in this part of the Bill as an attempt to reduce cookie consent pollution. It is a tiresome system that we all go through at the moment. The fact that it is tiresome means that, most of the time, we just click on it automatically rather than going through to the details. In a way, it is self-defeating. What the Government are trying to do will very much improve the quality of people’s response to cookies and will make them more aware, in situations where they are asked for consent, that this is important.
However—this will be the request at the end of my speech—between Committee and Report, I would really like to sit down with any noble Lords who are interested and are representatives of the relevant industry to discuss how we should deal with cookies that relate to supporting advertisement delivery. A lot of the web relies on advertisements for the revenue to support itself. By and large, for a lot of sites that you are not asked to pay but from which you get a lot of value, that value is supported by advertising. As a website, if you are going to charge someone for delivering advertising, you have to be able to prove that the advertisement has been delivered and to tell them something about the person to whom you are delivering it. In this process, you are not interested in having individual information. What you want is collective information; you want to
know that you have delivered 24,000 copies of this advertisement and know what the audience looks like. You absolutely do not want to end up with personal information.
Within that envelope—absolutely excluding the sorts of cookies that chase you around the internet saying, “Do you want a deckchair?”, just because you bought one two days ago—this is a vital part of the way the internet works at the moment. In Amendments 199 to 201, I suggest ways in which the clauses could be adapted to make sure that that use of cookies—as I say, it does not involve the sharing of personal information; it very much involves collective information—is allowed to continue uninterrupted.