Purpose

The EU institution must adequately inform users and obtain their consent before setting cookies and any other technology falling within the scope of Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy directive. By default, none of those cookies must be set.

Rules

For all Commission owned websites within the europa.eu domain, consent is managed centrally on domain level by implementing the Cookie Consent Kit. The consent indicated via the mandatory cookie consent kit covers the domain europa.eu.

All cookies within the europa.eu domain, placed by Commission-owned websites, are described on the Commission central cookie policy page: https://ec.europa.eu/info/cookies_en

Regarding the actual cookies on a specific site, the site owner has to check whether the cookies used are already mentioned on the corporate cookies page. If not, DG COMM should be contacted with an inventory of all first- and third-party cookies providing information on their purpose, the type of data collected, stored or transmitted by cookies, and the lifetime of the cookie.

Procedure

These procedures are dedicated to external and internal developers and web masters of the European institutions. Consequently, features documented below are tailored to the European Commission's content management systems and internal guidelines.

Implementing user consent should be done by implementing the Cookie Consent Kit.

The cookie consent solution is a JavaScript‑based kit that, after some site‑specific configuration, will automatically add a header banner to the page. This header banner will disappear once the user has accepted or refused the cookies used on the website.

This solution provides the following functionalities:

• JavaScript to display automatically the header banner in 24 languages
• a wizard to declare your cookies and the link to your cookies notice page
• a JavaScript API with methods and functions that help to prevent prior storage of cookies
• a corporate‑consent cookie to remember the choice of the user across websites
• a template for the cookie notice page

Related links

Directive 2009/136/EC (ePrivacy Directive)

Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 (Data protection regulation for EU institutions)

EDPS Guidelines on the protection of personal data processed through web services provided by EU institutions

Documentation Cookie Consent Kit

Contact and support

If you require further assistance, please contact:

Comm Europa Management

European Commission
DG Communication 
Unit B.3 
Europa Web Communication