The Information Commissioner’s Office has provided an update on its action to tackle cookie compliance, which has brought the vast majority of the UK’s most used websites into compliance with rules on the use of advertising cookies.

This has given an estimated 80% of UK internet users over the age of 14 – equating to around 40 million people – greater control over how they are tracked for personalised advertising, it said.

Its assessment focused on three key areas of compliance: whether non-essential advertising cookies were stored on users’ devices before users could exercise their choice to accept or reject them; whether rejecting non-essential advertising cookies was as easy as accepting them; and whether any non-essential advertising cookies were placed even though a user had not consented to them.

The ICO says that as a result of this work, 979 of the top 1,000 websites met the ICO’s compliance checks at the time of their most recent test, with only 21 websites identified as still failing.