Cookie Law In Spotlight Again With AOP

December 02, 2011

The Association of Online Publishers (AOP) has another good guest post highlighting the impending deadline for cookie compliance in the UK.

In summary, the new legislation requires businesses and organisations to receive informed consent before dropping cookies on computers within the EU, irrespective of where the website is hosted. This means that even US sites need to be compliant for site visitors residing in the EU. In addition, publishers are liable for 3rd party data collection and utilisation activities.

As a reminder, the directive suggests that publishers do three things:

1. Have an audit performed as soon as possible to determine what type of cookies and similar technologies you use and how you use them. Then classify what is ‘strictly necessary’ vs. ‘requires consent’, and remove highly intrusive collection channels.

2. Assess how intrusive the cookies are compared to your business expectations/requirements and legal requirements.

3. Develop a plan and decide which solutions you will implement to obtain consent. Relying on browser settings is not sufficient. This plan must be implemented by March 2012.

You can perform a tracking tag and cookie audit in a matter of minutes with Tagcert. More info.