Many people have already heard of the EU Cookie Law passed last year, many of you may not know that the law is to be enforced from 26th May 2012.
What is the EU Cookie Law? I hear you ask, well its a law to protect the privacy of anyone who browses a website based in the EU.
Cookies are small text files that are placed in your internet browser to track anything from website statistics to user journeys, login information and private confidential information.
The EU Cookie Law pretty much affects every website within the EU, if you are using some kind of analytics to track usage statistics, it is more than likely that you will be storing cookies on your website. By law, you must display a notice on your website allowing the website visitor to accept or decline “non essential” cookies on your website.
If a website owner is in breech of the law, they will be warned and if they choose not to comply will be fined £500,000.
What is essential and non essential?
Essential cookies will be for essential functionality of a website, for example if you own an eCommerce website and it needs to use cookies to work, they are essential. If its just to gain access to analytics and track your visitors, even though this is essential for you, its not essential for a website visitor.
So how do you stop it?
Well we’ve written a plug-in to deal with it, it comes in two flavours – an open source version for any web developer to go off and install or a paid for (it’s only £5 to cover ongoing support) highly configurable and easy to use WordPress plugin.
CookieCuttr for WordPress Plugin
Depending on your website, you may need to provide a cookie table in your privacy policy, like we will be doing shortly.
Post written by Chris Wharton – CookieCuttr Creator
