THE PROBLEM:

Troy and his family went on vacation to the United Kingdom in part because his wife had just inherited the family estate and they wanted to make arrangements to let it out and tie up loose ends around the estate of her late father.While in the United Kingdom, Troy was astounded by the number of people wearing American football and baseball jerseys and hats as well as the prices they were paying for them.This gave him a brilliant idea.What if he purchased these jerseys, got players to autograph them, and then sold them online from Canada for huge amounts of money?

Troy got busy setting up his new business.He hired Jimbo to create his business website including all the usual stuff such as the privacy statement.The privacy statement was accessible via a link at the bottom of the home page and when you went to it, in clause nine it mentioned that the site used cookies.Further, it told the website user that if they wanted to opt out of the cookies they could follow a certain process each time they accessed the website.Troy's new website was hosted on a server located just south of Montreal, Quebec.

Within the first year of having his online business up and running, he was amazed to find that he over 500,000 hits and had sold almost 2,500 jerseys to residents in the United Kingdom via mail order after purchases were made on his online website.

One day over lunch, he was mentioning all of this to his nephew who was taking the BBA program at Sheridan College.His nephew, Herman, mentioned that he might be violating the European Union (EU) Cookie law.Please answer the following questions about Troy's situation.

Questions:

1.What is the EU Cookie Law all about?

2.Could the EU Cookie Law apply to Troy's business when the business is in Canada and the server is also in Canada? Why or why not?

3.If the EU Cookie Law does apply, does Troy's current website comply?Why or why not?

4.If the website does not comply with the EU Cookie law, what is the potential downside to Troy?

5.What, if anything, does Troy need to do to make the site compliant?