EU Cookie Law – What can I do?!

  • Unknown's avatar
    kevinjohngallagher · Member ·

    I am dumbfounded at the response from the WordPress.com (legal) team.

    Regardless of people’s opinion’s on the Law itself, standards and concrete guidelines on how to comply with it have been around and clear for over a year now – even if we think they are daft. Lest we forget that this law actually came to pass over a year ago, with 3 countries opt-ing to give their businesses an extra 12 months to get their sites compliant.

    Even as someone who disagree’s with the law itself, the idea that WordPress.com, a system that has a sizeable percentage of the world’s websites hosted on it, simply wont comply with the law and worse, hasn’t come up with a position in the last year… is absolutely incredulous!!

    To clarify for those who are about to slate me, the proposed solution of…

    you may like to flag this fact for visitors to your site. One way to do this is to add a text widget to your side bar and include a link to our privacy policy

    …does not meet with the EU law. While it may get past the UK directive from the ICO, it will fail miserably from virtually every other EU country.

    Rest assured, if you are using a WordPress.com hosted site, and are an EU business you are in breach of the law. How fussed you are about that fact is down to each individual, and Heather makes some wonderful points about both the law and its enforceability; but ask yourself this:

    If the US passed a similar law, how quickly do you think WordPress.com would react?

    All of that aside, the fact that WordPress.com couldn’t even come to a standard position until 2 days after the UK’s 12 month extension had passed is scandalous.

  • Unknown's avatar
    pesieminski · Member ·

    Thanks for all of the feedback. As we (and some of the other commentors on this thread) have noted – the legal requirements of the UK cookie directive are far from clear. Indeed, the government’s position on a fundamental requirement of the law (implied consent) changed on the day of implementation – which must have been very frustrating for the handful of sites that made an effort to comply with the law as they understood it before implementation. Also, the vast majority of EU member states (other than the UK) have yet to issue any legislation at all in response to the EU directive. If and when they do, their requirements will likely be different than those set out by the ICO. This situation is not a model of government transparency or efficiency. Nonetheless, we definitely are watching developments closely, particularly as the ICO begins some dialog with large web properties on how best to implement the new law while balancing the interests of all sides.

    While all of these issues come to rest, we are happy to provide our users in the UK with tools to highlight the use of cookies for visitors to their sites, per the new law.

  • Unknown's avatar
    auxclass · Member ·

    @pesieminski – I am not in the EU and have not much knowledge of the EU cookie law after reading this whole thing added a text Widget to my site (my site is read in the EU) that linked to your privacy policy with a one sentence note that cookies could be disabled – to help your users you might think about posting a code snippet that blog owners could just copy and past into a text Widget – that would save blog owners the work of finding and making the link etc. Since I watch over several other blogs it did take some time so a bit of help would make life easier maybe for blog owners.

  • Unknown's avatar
    webdevlaw · Member ·

    @pesieminski staff-blorbo and others, I am now confirmed to speak on the topic of the EU Cookie Law and WordPress at WordCamp UK on 14-15 July in Edinburgh. Obviously that will deal with the UK interpretation.

    The last time I spoke on the topic I had a wide-eyed, eager, and somewhat anxious audience in their chairs ready for me to start before I’d even set up my presentation. I expect the same in July.

    To that end, by July, if I have to stand in front of these people and say “WordPress’s official position still consists of looking down at their shoes and mumbling about waiting for someone else”, you are going to make me look bad.

    Make me look good, kids. Stop shifting and get to work. We all did.

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