European data protection authority wants to lose cookie wall

The European privacy guard dog EDPS wants to have smarter, stricter and clearer privacy rules for electronic communication. For example the use of end-to-end-encryption to protect communication needs to be allowed and protected. They also want to get rid of the cookie wall. This will make the collection of client data via web adverts much more difficult.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) announced this in an opinion piece (pdf). The EDPS did this in response to the review by the European Commission of the ePrivacy directive. The ePrivacy directive regulates the management of personal data and data protection in electronic communications. According to EDPS´ Giovanni Buttarelli: “We need a new legal framework for ePrivacy, but we need a smarter, clearer and stronger one: we need more clarity but also better enforcement. We need it to ensure the confidentiality of our communications, a fundamental right enshrined in Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In addition, we also need provisions to complement, and where necessary, specify in more detail, the protections under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Furthermore, we also need to maintain the current, higher level of protection where the ePrivacy Directive provides more specific safeguards than the GDPR. The definitions of the GDPR, its territorial scope, the mechanisms for cooperation between enforcement authorities and for consistency, as well as the possibility to provide flexibility and guidance, should be available for ePrivacy.”

Tracking
Buttarelli further calls for the abolishment of cookie walls and says that communication should never be tracked or monitored, with the possible exception of analytics, without their active consent. He says that the use of cookies is equal to fingerprinting. Users should have a simple way of retracting their consent via their browser.