May 26, 2012. Are you ready?

The EU Directive on cookies, which became UK law on the 26th May 2011, puts a new compliance requirement on website owners, including owners of sites delivered by third parties. The EU 'Cookie Law' is amended privacy legislation that requires websites to obtain informed consent from visitors before they can store or retrieve any information on a computer or any other web connected device. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the UK, which is responsible for enforcing the new law, has allowed all organisations one year from May 2011 to put cookie auditing, monitoring and visitor opt-in strategies in place.

Compliance is mandatory

There is no way around it, website owners are responsible for understanding how many cookies you have on all of your websites, determining the cookie types and disclosing to your visitors what information is collected and shared with third parties via cookies or other tracking tags. Although you may not have all of the answers today about how to handle your visitor opt-in strategy, monitor will help you take care of the essential first step of putting in place an ongoing cookie auditing and monitoring service.

You can be fined for not doing this

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is the body responsible for enforcing the UK law, and has been given powers to fine website owners up to £500,000 for serious breaches in the law. The sooner you take steps to perform your website cookie audit, the more understanding the ICO is likely to be if your website is reported for violating the law. Tagcert is the service you need to efficiently deal with regulators and prove that you are taking compliance with the law seriously.

You must perform an audit

The first step to compliance is establishing ongoing cookie audits of your websites. The most cost effective way to do this is to use a cookie auditing and monitoring service like Tagcert. The ICO in the UK and other EU governing bodies will begin to request proof of cookie audits and cookie audit histories. monitor will allow you to professionally demonstrate you are making best efforts to understand how your website is using cookies all year round.