As you may be aware, the government passed a law just under 1 year ago regarding the use of cookies on websites. The responsibility for ensuring that you inform users of cookie use falls squarely on the owner of said website(s).
Whilst we may not agree with the end result of changes that this law enforces you to make, we as website owners should nonetheless adhere to the letter of the law.
So what does this mean for you and your site? Well this will depend on what cookies your website is storing and what you need to ask the users permission for but it will almost definitely mean that you will require some kind of message to be added to your website so that users can choose to accept or decline cookies.
One interesting point however is that many of our clients use Google Analytics which is a great tool but unfortunately also stores cookies within the users browser. It hasn’t yet been confirmed but I would suggest that you may need to ask permission of the user to track your statistics using Google Analytics. This of course then makes the statistics almost worthless in my opinion, but I will leave that decision to you.
What do you do now? If you’re running a conGuu based site, there’s nothing else to worry about. We’re already auditing your site and will be in touch shortly to discuss changes (if any) that are required for your site. If you would like us to carry out a cookie audit on your site then please contact me directly and we can discuss what needs to happen.
For further reading, please visithttp://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspxregarding the requirement.