Are you cookie compliant?

The furore of cookie compliance has died down somewhat since May 2012 when it was all in the news, but this doesn’t mean it has gone away.

The Cookie Law is still very much in action, and really we should all have made our blogs compliant, even the new ones. You may think this only applies to the big organisations who do a lot of digital marketing and online activity via their websites, but even a small blog is, sometimes unwittingly, using cookies as part of its general use.

For example, if you use Google Analytics to monitor your blog’s performance, you are using cookies to gather that information. This is not a bad use, as it doesn’t necessarily interfere with your visitors or bombard them with focused advertising, but it is taking information from the website and storing it temporarily on the browser of the user so that data can be recorded appropriately in the analytic statistics.

There are plenty of plugins available for WordPress.org blogs that will bring up the required pop-up menu or statement to comply with the law, some free and some paid for, depending on how much you value your cookie compliance. I use one called Cookie Control but I’m sure there are others that will suit your requirements.

When you first visit the website www.cookielaw.org a pop-up appears prominently at the bottom of the page, which you can either read and delete, or if ignored will then disappear signifying you have accepted their cookie use. This is an acceptable method of notifying your visitors that you are aware of the cookie law and its compliance procedures.

The law was slightly relaxed in May 2012 so that as long as the site stated clearly and obviously which cookies were used and what for, and an option was given for “implied consent” of cookie use to the site user, then that was acceptable. This is certainly true for blogs that are hosted by the blogging platform (WordPress.com or Blogger) where the responsibility is passed onto the blogging platform, but since the blog contains your content it’s wise to add a prominent statement in a text widget at the bottom of the sidebar just in case, as shown by the two examples here.

Some businesses have gone a step further and have created a separate webpage that provides a proper statement as part of their policy of cookie compliance. This doesn’t have to be a complicated affair, nor does it have to be in lawyer speak, but the link needs to be prominent and noticeable should the ICO come looking for it.

This is a suggestion of what the private policy could contain: acknowledgement of the user’s privacy, any data obtained about them is carefully stored in a safe and secure system and is not shared with any third party, whenever the contact form is used by a visitor their details are not added to a mailing list, and any auto responder used to deliver materials to the recipient is done through a certified system compliant with data law. Cookies are used to track visitor performance and website use, and the user is reassured that personal data is not gathered that could identify them. Should the website user be unhappy with cookie use, they are requested not to use the website.

I wrote two posts about the Cookie Law in May 2012 that will give you more of an insight of what was happening at that time, should you care to find out more:

Are you becoming cookie compliant?
Lack of compliance causes cookie law relaxation

Why not use the comment box below to ask your questions or add to this post with any more information you may have.

About Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott, aka Fairy Blog Mother, is an award winning blogging consultant who has been looking after bloggers since 2006! Woah, that's a long time! She specialises in "explaining things really simply" about WordPress, and has twice been noted as a top WordPress influencer for 2019.

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