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Sunday, 27 May 2012

Straying Outside the Law

I just watched this video about the new EU cookie law. I run two small websites, which don't use cookies, but I was intrigued by the claim that 90% of EU web sites violate the law. How could it be so high? A worrying idea occurred to me. I googled "does google analytics violate eu cookie law", and the very first hit confirmed my fears. I had become a criminal!

To be honest, I don't look at the Google Analytics data very often, so rather than pay £50 for someone's jQuery plugin to get me back on the straight and narrow, I just commented out the offending JavaScript.

What a relief! And what a relief too for my few visitors, knowing that I will no longer be able to know that they've visited me, even though I had no way of knowing who they were.

My only lingering worry is that leaving the commented out code in my HTML files could count as conspiracy.

1 comment:

  1. ...a day before enforcement was due to start, the ICO revealed it would consider "implied consent" to be good enough - meaning sites can simply tell users that by continuing to use the site, cookies will be used.

    Read more: ICO surprises with last-minute cookies changes | News | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/374875/ico-surprises-with-last-minute-cookies-changes#ixzz1wS60YT8P

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