Last year I wrote a very popular post on the upcoming EU Cookie law ” Have you got permission to open the cookie jar.
The article highlighted the state of general confusion that the new law created. This hasn’t really improved over the last 12 months with the deadline for compliance looming on the 26th May 2012.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are taking the lead with implementing the directive but 82% of web marketeers in a recent survey think the legislation is not good for business. Even the Information Commissioners own stats would back this up as only 10% of their visitors have actually agreed to the cookies on their site.
The spirit behind the legislation, which wanted to control the abuse of tracking cookies by third party sites, is to be commended but as usual when legislators get involved in technical issues the implementation tends to be a bit of a mess to say the least.
It seems that companies in the UK are either not worried about or are ignorant of the legislation. According to the BBC they recently reported that 95% of the top companies in the UK are not compliant. If they are not compliant then you can bet that a similar high percentage of the rest of the UK Small and Medium Businesses will not be compliant either.
So what do you need to do to avoid a 500,000 fine!
What to Do
Our advice last year was to wait and see the what developed as there was talk of the browser developers such as Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer coming up with an easy technical solution for users to agree to cookies. So far this hasn’t materialised.
The Information Commissioner updated their guidance about the Cookie Legislation in December 2011 and copy can be downloaded here.
The advice remains pretty much the same ” encouraging website owners to proactively review their cookie usage and their privacy policies. They also now recommend making the link to the statement on cookies more prominent on every page, not just the home page, as every page is a potential entry page from the search engines.
They also give some example of how to get the consent with actions such as pop-ups for site wide consent to more subtle check boxes on login screens. BT have taken a stance whereby first time visitors are asked to agreed to site wide cookies with an option to change at any time. There are currently no stats as to how successful this has been.
No matter how much information and reassurance you give a visitor about the use of cookies on your site, a big risk is that the default action by the visitor will be to reject them. This will be a major problem for on-line retailers as customers opting out will have a reduced experience and they could lose out on sales.
A recent survey by E-Consultancy showed that 69% of respondents knew what cookies were, but only 23% of users would actually actually say yes if a website asked their permission to set cookies.
It is a tough call about what to do and you cannot really hide behind the numbers in that most other websites are not compliant either.
As I said last year the Information Commissioner is going to take a practical viewpoint on the implementation and so long as you are planning the implemetation of a solution you will not necessarily get prosecuted straight away.
If you want some advice or guidance on how this legislation may affect your business then please get in touch and we will be happy to chat through your options.
Call the team on 01626 834433 or email sales@ayrmer.co.uk