There is still a lot of uncertainty on how to ensure you are complying with the updated privacy laws that were passed last year, commonly known as the 'Cookie Law'. What is certain is that the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is in a position to enforce the law. What is uncertain, is how the law will be interpreted and what will be enforced. There is still some ambiguity about which cookies require visitor consent, while protecting the privacy of European citizens.
Having evaluated the website changes some of the bigger institutions and companies have made, we have developed an easy to deploy solution that, we believe, will demonstrate that your websites are endeavouring to comply with the laws. Here comes the disclaimer bit:
We are not legal experts and cannot guarantee that this solution will be compliant with the law. Please seek your own legal counsel to provide you with any assurance that you need.
OK, disclaimer in place. In reality, the coming months will provide insights into how the law will be interpreted and enforced. However we have implemented our solution ourselves and therefore feel that, at best, it makes us compliant. At worst, it shows that we are trying to be compliant. Of all of the examples we reviewed the ICO's own implementation is the most brutal which limits the usefulness of tools like Google Analytics to help provide useful insight and data. HSBC's is the most relaxed, simply making a statement. Ours falls neatly in between these two and, we believe, strives to achieve what the law is trying to achieve without sacrificing useful anonymous user data.
Please take a look at our website (www.wisetiger.co.uk) to see it in action. The solution drives a simple statement of intent to use cookies to collect anonymous visitor information for the benefit of the website visitors. Something we believe most people won't have a problem with as that's been happening since the Internet started, and it's anonymous. With our solution implemented, people are constantly reminded of the use of cookies as they navigate around the site. Effectively we're collecting their consent on each navigation click. If they elect to, the visitor can remove the message from view by agreeing that they are ok with its statement. The message also links to the privacy statement of the website which will give them fuller information about what the website does to manage their privacy and indeed more detail about the cookies themselves. By the way, cookies which are deemed to provide an essential function for the visitor of the website, i.e. to remember a login session or products in a shopping cart, are not targeted by this law as they are deemed to have an inherent consent built in. In other words people are consenting to the use of these kinds of cookies by logging-in or by adding products to a shopping cart.
Useful links to relevant information:
Best wishes, WiseTiger.
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