The EU Cookie Directive concerning new rules about the use of cookies was introduced in the UK on 26 May 2011. Website owners have been given a year to comply with the new legislation which is being regulated by the Information Commissioner’s Office. It is the responsibility of the website owner to conform to this Directive as it is now part of UK legislation. To quote directly from the ICO guidelines; ‘this isn’t going away. It’s the law’ and consequently covers the use of all cookies on websites.
A cookie is used by a website to send ’state information’ to a User’s browser and for the browser to return the state information to the website. A major concern that has initiated the EU Directives is that they can be used by spyware to track user’s browsing activities.
Cookies are used widely across websites, particularly to track those users who are neither registered nor logged in. Cookies are a useful device to track and thus analyse visitor navigation paths through your website.
There is one key alteration that will occur because of the EU Cookie Directive; the explicit consent of the user must be obtained before any cookie is set. The User must also be given an ability to opt-out from having cookies stored on their computer.
A summary of the visual changes that we are recommending our clients implement are :-
- a new ‘Privacy options’ tab
- a footer panel with ‘opt-in’ and ‘opt-out’ buttons
- updates to the privacy policy and terms and conditions
A summary of the technical changes that we will be implementing via our CMS are :-
- a change to the ‘apache cookie’ to be session-specific
- adding a ‘cookie preference cookie’
- the modification of the Google Analytics logic
- modification of the cookie setting process
EU Cookie Directive Compliance
For more information concerning the impact of the legislation on owners of multiple websites and mobile sites; the differences when users ‘opt in’ and ‘opt out’ of using cookies and questions about Google Analytics download our free information.