EU Cookie legislation

[Lucy Portsmouth]

I had this email through today ... does anyone know anything about this? (Obviously, I'm not going to take him up on his offer if I *do* need to do something about it).

Hi,

My name is Alex and I am contacting websites that are not compliant with the new EU cookie law. If you're not familiar with the law, please read more about it here:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_comm...

Your website is currently illegal in the EU as it's not asking users to accept cookies and you are still tracking them through your analytics data. Even if you're not using this data it's still best to be safe and not have your site shutdown by the authorities and have a fine up to £500,000.

 

Has anyone with a website done anything to make sure they're compliant? I'm going to look into it a little bit more, but was wondering if anyone else had dealt with it already, and might be able to give me a few tips??

Thanks

Lucy

[Anna Stassen]

Hi Lucy

Firstly you're right to ignore these opportunist emails there is lots of scaremongoring going on about this.

UK Handmade have approached it by adding information to our Privacy & Cookies Policy on the website which you can check out here: http://ukhandmade.co.uk/privacy-cookies and we are also working on a popup.

For your purposes you can either go all out and have a cookies policy page and crib from our policy up there OR if google analytics is the only cookie you are using then adding something like the following para either on your general terms and conditions page or as a footer on your website should be acceptable:

"This site uses Google Analytics and users should disable cookies in their browser if they don’t wish for their visit to be tracked." 

 

Hope this helps

 

Anna x

[Lucy Portsmouth]

That's fantastic - thanks Anna. I was worried I was going to have to spend time/money getting my site compliant.  I'm only using Analytics, so I think I'll go for the note. Is it OK if I share this??

[Anna Stassen]

If you're using blogger or wordpress they should also have a handy widget or plugin you can add to create a popup message asking visitors to accept/decline cookies when they first visit.

The plugin I downloaded for my wordpress site is called: "Cookie Confirm"