PROVENANCE
Cookie consent exists in EU law because of Alexander Hanff.
The cookie-consent requirement the entire Consent Management Platform industry was built around traces back to a campaign Alexander Hanff led, and to the directive that campaign produced. WebSentinel is built by the person who put that consent requirement into EU law, and who has spent the last decade and a half watching the industry fail to honour it.
HOW WE GOT HERE
From Phorm to the directive the whole industry sits on.
Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC was rewritten by Directive 2009/136/EC following a multi-year civil-society campaign Alexander Hanff led against Phorm, the UK ISP-level deep-packet-inspection programme that intercepted subscriber browsing traffic without consent. Privacy International recruited him on the strength of that campaign, and in his role there he went on to represent civil society at the European Commission round-tables that debated the consent mechanism for the new directive across twelve months of negotiations, sitting opposite the advertising and ISP industries, walking out of the final session in protest at the Chair, Robert Madelin, failing to chair the process objectively. The directive went on to introduce the cookie-consent requirement that the entire Consent Management Platform industry has been built around for the last fifteen years.
In the sixteen years since, he has worked as a consultant and adviser inside organisations of every size, watching every CMP product on the market promise enforceable consent and fail at the most basic technical requirement, which is removing the third-party cookies the visitor has just rejected. The industry has had fifteen years to fix this and never did, which is why WebSentinel Guard exists, built by the person who put cookie consent into EU law in the first place and who has spent the last decade and a half watching the industry try and fail to honour it.
I helped write the law that says a visitor has to be able to refuse tracking, then watched an entire industry sell software that takes the click and quietly leaves the tracking in place. Guard is the product I built to make Reject finally mean Reject.
THE COMPANY
That Privacy Guy!
WebSentinel is a product of That Privacy Guy!, founded by Alexander Hanff and based in Malta, in the European Union. Building it under a European company, on EU-based and EU-owned infrastructure, is a deliberate choice that matches what the product is for.
NEXT STEP
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