On October 1, 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union (E.C.J.) issued its judgment in Case C-673/17, Planet49, following a request for a preliminary ruling from the Bun​desgerichtsof  (Federal Court of Justice) in Germany. According to a press release from the Court, the German court asked the E.C.J. to interpret Directive 2002/58/EC on the protection of e-communications privacy. In particular, the E.C.J. was asked whether requiring users to deselect a pre-checked checkbox to refuse their consent to cookies satisfies the meaning of “consent” in the Directive. In answering “no”, the Court held that consent must be “active” and that “consent in the form of a preselected tick in a checkbox does not imply active behaviour on the part of a website user.” The Court further stated that, “[i]t is not inconceivable that a user would not have read the information accompanying the preselected checkbox, or even would not have noticed that checkbox, before continuing with his or her activity on the website visited.” The German Federal Court of Justice must now take the E.C.J.’s preliminary ruling into account in making its decision on the case at the national level.