EU Cookie Law

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small text file placed on the user's machine by a website. This file allows the website to keep track of activity on the site during visits, and access that information on subsequent visits. The information includes login and personalisation preferences, as well as analytics information. 

EU Cookie Law Explained

The EU Cookie Law, or more correctly the e-Privacy Directive, is legislation enacted by the EU to protect web users privacy. As a webmaster you need to get "informed consent" from your visitors prior to placing a cookie on their machine.

Cookie Law Compliance

To become compliant with the law, you must assess the cookies you are storing. Make a list of their names, and then classify them:

• Essential - Required for your website to function, for example to mark someone as being logged in
• Non-Essential but harmless - Not essential to core functionality but doesn't get used for tracking a user
• Fairly Intrusive - Used to track people but do not provide personally identifiable information, for example Google Analytics
• Very Intrusive - Used to track people and provide personally identifiable information

Once you have a list can can eliminate intrusive cookies, and inform your users about those that are harmless.

How Can we Help

We will check your website, cookies, and company requirements to produce a report. We can then solve all the issues arising in that report by finding simple ways for you to achieve compliance. We ensure cookies are only used for essential or harmless functions by offloading other functionality, such as keeping sessions in the database rather than in cookies, and using analytics that expose an API allowing the website to transmit the information without use of cookies. In this way we can provide full functionality for your website and business without any intrusive cookies. Additionally, we add on-page information and options informing and enabling visitors to "opt in" or "opt out" of your analytics, as you prefer.