Squeezemind S.r.l. – Violation Found (Italy, 2025)

Cookiemetrix is an online service that analyses the cookies on websites and suggests whether or not they require the consent of the end users. Cookiemetrix is marketed as a tool to aid companies comply with EU data protection law and is available under both a free and a paid subscription. In October 2024 the DPA carried out an ex-officio investigation against Squeezemind s.r.l. - the controller and owner or Cookiemetrix. The DPA investigated both the functioning of Cookiemetrix and the use of cookies on the controller’s website. = The controller’s website displayed a cookie banner which allowed users to accept “advertisement cookies” or to browse the website with only strictly necessary cookies. This preference was stored in a cookie - a common practice for many websites. The investigation found that despite the wording of the cookie banner, the website never used advertising cookies. In this regard, the controller explained that it removed advertising cookies from its website years before the investigation took place, but forgot to change or deactivate the cookie banner. = Cookiemetrix analysed and labelled cookies in several steps. First, Cookiemetrix crawled a web page, listed all the cookies that the page attempt to write, and assessed which of those cookies were conditional on the user's consentTo this end, Cookiemetrix would actually crawl each page twice. In one crawl, Cookiemetrix would simulate consenting to any cookie pop-ups on the page; in the other, it would simulate rejecting consent. By comparing the results, Cookiemetrix learned not only what cookies were written but also which cookies were conditional on the user's consent.. Then, Cookiemetrix matched these cookies against an open-source library of known cookies and labelled each cookie as “essential” (i.e.: requiring consent under the law) or “non-essential” (i.e.: when the cookies fell under one of the exemptions of the ePrivacy Directive) according to the library. Finally, Cookiemetrix provided