VCLEVER BLOG

Posted on May 26, 2012 at 4:24 pm by Andrew Arnott

Chances are you’ve heard about the ‘EU Cookie Law’. If you have, you might very well be confused or worried about its implications and what exactly you should be doing about it. If you haven’t, and you own or run a company’s website within the EU, then you need to take note and you probably need to take action (but don’t panic, because it’s not as bad as you might think).

What is it?

The EU Cookie Law as it’s being called is actually part of a European E-Privacy Directive. It was brought in by those helpful people at the EU to protect your privacy.  They think people don’t know what cookies are or what they do (which is probably fair) and that the way to tackle this is to get every website to ask their users to opt in to the use of cookies. Although, browsers allow you to change your privacy settings, apparently this is not enough. There have been a lot of people throwing their toys out of the pram about it (also probably fair), because its most severe interpretation would have every website presenting new users with a big banner asking for their permission to use any cookies (and then only using them if the user ticks ‘yes’).

Read on to see how it affects you