BRUSSELS - Internet users in Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Italy can complain to national authorities if Web sites fail to alert them about cookies the sites automatically download to their computers, an official at the European Commission said Friday.
These four countries are the only members of the 15-nation European Union to begin following cookie provisions in a European Union-wide directive on data protection agreed to in June last year.
The directive instructs Web sites to display prominently, either on a pop-up window or somewhere immediately visible on a home page, details about the cookies and what they do, but it does not forbid Web sites from initially setting the cookies to users' computers. Web sites must also provide easy instructions to help visitors remove the cookies and must allow visitors to refuse all future cookies.
E-mail users in Austria, Italy, Denmark and Belgium also can theoretically take legal action against spammers through their national authorities, while recipients of spam in other Union countries don't have even this theoretical access to justice, the expert said on condition of anonymity.
Antispam provisions in the directive outlaw unsolicited mass e-mail, but permit online marketers to contact existing clients with product or service offers via e-mail.
Friday marks the deadline by which Union member states should have put the data protection directive into national law, but as with many EU-wide laws, many countries are running behind schedule.
The expert said he expects 10 countries to have implemented the data protection law into national law by the end of this year. In the meantime, computer users in countries that have not signed up remain in legal limbo.
Even after member states have the directive in their national statute books, Web surfers and e-mail users still won't have much legal protection from spam and unwanted cookies that originate from outside the Union, the expert said.
The U.S. is the most common spam source worldwide.
"We are trying to promote a multilateral approach to fighting these unwanted elements," he said.
Next February the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based organization, which includes most developed nations, will host a conference to discuss the issue of multilateral cooperation in the fight against spammers and cookie use on the Web.
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