ePrivacy Directive: impact on digital communication

The ePrivacy Directive complements GDPR in electronic communications. It affects cookies, email marketing and metadata treatment in digitally shared documents.

Scope of application

• Consent for non-essential cookies.
• Rules for commercial email communications.
• Confidentiality of communications and metadata.
• Interaction with document privacy policies.

Relation to anonymization

Before publishing documents on the web or sending them by email, anonymize personal data to comply with both ePrivacy and GDPR.

Checklist for marketing and legal teams

• Anonymize attachments before campaigns or B2B newsletters with documents.
• Review cookies and consent on portals where you publish PDFs.
• Avoid personal identifiers in filenames or URLs.
• Coordinate ePrivacy + GDPR in the same processing register.