Heads Up Publishers, UK Changing Policies Around Cookies

New rules governing the use of website “cookies” were issued by the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), effective May 26, 2011. These new rules require web publishers to enable users to “opt-in” to the use of cookies for purposes such as tracking, etc. There is a 12 month transition period (ending May 26, 2012) for companies to meet the new requirements. During that period, companies have to take steps to comply with this new regulation although complete compliance is not required before May 26, 2012.

The new UK rules apply to all websites hosted in Europe and websites hosted elsewhere if they target UK residents. U.S. websites that market their sites to UK residents or that have a large number of UK users may be subject to the new rules and be required to comply.

The AddThis toolset does use cookies to enable some aspects of the service, such as menu personalization and content analytics. Though the legal requirements don’t specify any specific steps required over the course of the next year, we’ve already been evaluating different ways to make sure that if your website falls under the jurisdiction of the UK regulations, we can help you be fully compliant while using AddThis. Expect updates via this blog and our support forums as we roll out configuration features to support the opt-in capabilities, and if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

http://www.wasaweb.net/en/index.html wasaweb

Similar pieces of legislation should be coming into force in other EU Member States, as the UK law regarding cookies [The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011] stems from Directive 2009/136/EC, so webmasters need to be prepared for some changes if they have a significant presence within the EU.
http://www.businessprocessreengineering.org/bpm/ BPM

I guess some search engines are not really going to love this. There are quite a lot of sites that have their ads displayed, and consequently place cookies. So visitors would first have to accept, before being able to read the content? Wow, that will affect a lot of pages on the web. Not to mention the income model of the search engines. Wonder how this is going to unfold.
http://balance-scale.info Balance Scales

Google will be PISSED.
https://www.astonleather.com/index.asp shearling gloves

Fabulous read that saved me from being horribly bored at work! Thanks for that!
http://www.igricegames.net/ Igrice Games

I did not know that. Ok, new rule is new rule.
http://www.SumonRahman.com Sumon Rahman

Cheers like your What is here!
AG

Please can you provide an update on this? I can’t see any info on the blog/support pages?

Thanks
Will

Is there any update on this from AddThis? The deadline for compliance is looming.
As far as I can tell from this ill conceived and poorly worded ruling, cookies which can be catageorised as ‘Strictly Necessary’ or ‘Performance’ are ok. Do the AddThis cookies fall into this camp?
Peter

Yeah, an update on this would be good since the law is supposedly going to start being enforced in a couple of weeks time.
Luke Smith

Yes, and update would be good please.

Specifically a list of cookies that AddThis drops on users computers and what they are used for. This is a requirement of the E-Privacy Directive so every UK website that uses AddThis will need to publish this information on their site as well as asking users to opt-in to allow these cookies to be set.

In addition could I suggest adding a feature to your API that would only allow cookies to be dropped after the user has provided consent?
http://www.gems.tv Barry kirley

Hi…
I would be very interested in an update on this please.
Regards
Lease deals

Google is not going to like it. Any updates on this rule?