EU Cookie compliance put into practice
We’ve written about the upcoming EU’s European e-Privacy directive regarding HTTP cookies once before (http://blog.island-webworks.net/2011/03/the-way-the-cookie-crumbles), and we didn’t exactly come down on the positive side of this upcoming legislation. However, the law is passed and will come into effect later this month, so we thought we’d better find a way to comply without reducing the usability of our web sites.
The challenge set by the e-Privacy directive is that any web site operating within the EU will have to clearly state what cookies they want to set and how they’re to be used. Only after getting explicit consent by the user would a web site be allowed to set any cookies1 on the users machine.
So, in order to use cookies you now really need to set another cookie to store the user’s preferences, which ironically means that if the user denies the use of cookies, you have no legal way of storing that user preference in a cookie and will have to keep nagging those users every time they visit your web site.
Unobtrusive nagging
Taking the above into account, it was clear that an unobtrusive method of alerting the user was required – something that could be displayed on every page without impacting on the user experience. After some thinking we decided to use a discreet info bar appearing at the bottom of the web page.
An info bar appearing at the bottom of the page to highlight that cookies might be used.
The info bar would state that we wish to set some cookies and ask if the user would be ok with that. By clicking the ‘Tell me more’ link an information window would appear.
On clicking the information bar's 'Tell me more'-link, a window with detailed information appears and gives the user the option of accepting or denying the use of cookies.
This information window is where the user either accept or deny the use of cookies for this site. The bottom paragraph also points out that if the user don’t accept cookies, we would have to ask them every time they visit.
Since this is a procedure the user will probably only want to go through once, the system is designed to be easily ignored. The info bar can be closed without further ado by clicking the close button, or it can be ignored completely without affecting the usability of the site.
However, the main problem with the new legislation remains: only a very few visitors will ever explicitly approve the use of cookies, which essentially means that the use of tracking technologies like Google Analytics is going to become more or less obsolete in the Eurpoean Union. That’s quite a blow to any organisation trying to improve their web sites to better suit their visitors’ needs!
1) The term “cookies” refer to any kind of file stored on a users computer in order to track that user. As such, this also includes so called Flash cookies.
