This week at Darwin, we have been looking into the changes which were made to the ‘Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations’ on the 26th May 2011. The changes we are interested in state that a website visitor must give consent for cookies to be stored on their computer as well as being presented with a clear explanation as to what each cookie is doing. We have spent time assessing what these changes mean to us and our website, as well as designing a solution which will ensure that we comply with the new requirements when they are enforced later in 2012.
The general purpose of the changes seems to be one of protecting the privacy of website users. Cookies are currently used for a wide range of tasks, from facilitating the login process to tracking user activity across websites for targeted advertising, and it is the latter which these new laws seem to be most concerned with. Ultimately this sounds like a good thing, although for website owners, implementing a solution may be time consuming and costly. If not addressed properly, the affect of cookies being blocked at the user level could have a detrimental affect on a website. Take Google, for example. What affect will blocking cookies have on their targeted advertising model?
We are now testing a solution for our own website and we’ll be rolling this out in the next couple of months when we’re confident that we meet all the new requirements. One thing we have noticed while investigating this is that not many websites seem to have implemented a solution yet, although there is still a little time before these new laws are enforced. It will be interesting to see how some of the big players approach this issue, though. One thing is for sure; these new laws are not going away anytime soon, so if you are a website owner and you haven’t looked into the changes required, maybe now is the time!