Hi all

Just thought you should know about the recent developments regarding online tracking using cookies which is relevant to virtually anyone who has a website.

Online Tracking

As I have told anyone who will listen (not many!) the days of tracking your site visitors and pestering them with advertising after they have left your site seems to be doomed (thankfully) but the implications of the new laws are wider than most people are aware.

“all websites in the EU must seek consent to store cookies that are not essential to the operation of a website on a visitor’s computer”.

There are big implications for a lot of website owners and I suggest all website owners read up on it.

The Halifax are letting people know about their use of cookies as follows:

We have updated our terms and conditions.

To explain how we use cookies we’ve recently updated our Privacy Policy and the Internet Banking Terms and Conditions.

We haven’t changed how we use cookies, but if you’d like to know more about them and why we use them, you can also find detailed information on our Cookie policy page.

[ ]Tick to confirm you’ve read this message

For the Halifax the use of cookies is an integral part of the operation of the ebanking facilities so this message may prove to be enough to be compliant.  However for most companies this would not be good enough.

So what should I do?

If you are using cookies on your site  so you can then serve visitors adverts after they have left your site you should stop it! or at least tell them that this is what you plan on doing and get their permission.

If you are using cookies to track visitors as part of delivering a service  within your site you need to tell them what you are doing and why.

If you are using cookies to monitor how many people come to your site and what they do on your site (eg you have Google analytics or similar) you need to let the visitor know and get their permission.

A good idea is to see how larger companies are doing it and follow their example. You will probably also need to change your privacy policy and terms and conditions.

Even if you can come up with a clever way to phrase your request to make it sound more palatable,  there are some developments that will make it very difficult to get around.

Computer security firm AVG recently announced a new ‘do-not-track’ feature for Windows which is automatically defaults to ‘do-not-track’ on its free and paid security products as a free update. Other security firms are likely to follow this example and the result will be that you have to actively seek specific permission to use cookies.

It might be a big step backwards for some website owners and online marketing companies but it is hopefully a little step forward for mankind!

If you want to know more about online marketing and how to do it effectively but ethically, talk to IC-e.