Cookies F.A.Q.

---

1. What cookies are?

A cookie is a small piece of text sent to your browser by a website you visit. It helps the website to remember information about your visit that can make your next visit easier and the site more useful to you. Instead, cookies of third parties are provide by a different website that the user is surfing. This because on each website there may be evidence (images, maps, sounds, specific links to other domains) which are on different server.

2. What the cookies are for?

We use cookies for many purposes. We use them, for example, to help you sign up for in a website, to remember your safe search preferences or your ad settings.

3. What are technical cookies?

Technical cookies are those which allow browsing on the Internet or providing a specific service required by the user. They are not used for different purposes and they are usually installed directly by the owner of the website. Without these cookies, the website cannot work properly and some operations would be more complex and/or less safe such as home banking activities (bank transfers, bank account information, bills payment). For this type of activities, technical cookies are crucial.

4. Analytics Cookies are technical cookies?

No. The Italian Guarantor has pointed out that analytics cookies may be treated as technical cookies only where they are used directly by the owner of the website, who may collect information in an aggregated form on the number of users and their preferences while surfing on the website. Under these conditions, the same set of rules on disclosure and consent, applicable for technical cookies, applies to analytics cookies.

5. What are preferences cookies?

These cookies are used to track user’s navigation on the website and to remember information that changes the way the site behaves or looks and profile such as preferred language. For instance, these cookies may be transmitted, to the user’s terminal, customized advertisements according to the user’s preferences.

6. Is the user’s consent necessary to install cookies on your terminal?

It depends on purposes for which cookies are used and namely if they are technical cookies or preferences cookies. To the installation of technical cookies, the user’s consent is not required, whereas it is necessary to provide the full disclosure policy (art. 13 of the Regulation EU 2016/679). On the contrary, to the installation of preferences cookies, the user’s consent is required and they may be installed only after that the user, informed about the treatment in a simple way, has given the express consent.

7. In which way the owner of the website has to provide the privacy policy and ask for the user’s consent for cookies' using?

As underlined by the Italian Guarantor, the privacy policy has to be set on two different levels. At a time when the user obtains the access to a website (on the homepage or any other page), it must appear a banner showing a brief cookies policy, which includes the request for user’s consent and a link to obtain access to the full disclosure. In this page, the user shall find more and detailed information on cookies to select which types he/she wants to enable.

8. How the banner shall look like?

The size of the banner shall cover partially the webpage that the user is visiting. It shall be closed only through an active interaction of the user, meaning through the selection of a specific element on the page below.

9. Which indication the banner shall include?

The banner shall specify that the website uses advertising cookies, if necessary also of “third parties”, which allow making advertisements more engaging to users’ preferences. It shall include the link to the full disclosure and the indication that, through that specific link, it is possible to disable cookies. It shall specify that by using the website, even by skipping the banner, the user accepts cookies.

10. In which way is possible to verify that the consent has been collected through the banner?

The owner of the website may use a specific non-harmful technical cookie to keep track of the consent, which does not require a new consent. In this case, it is not required that the brief policy is showed once more to the user during the next visit, without prejudice to the possibility for the user to enable cookies and/or to modify preferences, at any time and in a user-friendly way, for example through given access to full disclosure, which shall be accessible from any page of the website.

11. The online consent to enable cookies may be requested only through the banner?

No. The owners of the website have always the possibility to use different ways from the one identified by the Italian Guarantor, provided that these ways meet all the requirements of validity of consent required by law.

12. In case of technical cookies is there any obligation for the owners to use banner on website that just use technical cookies?

No. In this case, the owner of the website may give the full disclosure to users in a manner that is considered more appropriate, for example, even by providing detailed information in the privacy policy provided in the website.

13. What the full disclosure shall include?

It shall include all the requirements sought by law, it shall clarify carefully all the features and the purposes of the used cookies to enable the users to allow/disallow each cookies category. It shall include the updated link to the full disclosures and to the forms of third parties with whom the owner of the website has established agreements for the installation of cookies through the website. Lastly, it shall underline the possibility for the user to choose cookies even through the settings of the browser.

14. Who shall provide the disclosure and require the user’s consent to enable cookies?

The owner of a website who uses preferences cookies. In case of cookies of third parties installed through the website, the obligations on disclosure and consent shall be under the responsibility of the concerned third parties. Anyway the owner of the website, as a technical intermediary, shall include in the full disclosure the appropriate links to the third parties’ policies and forms in order to provide the consent.