Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Blogger Initiated User's EU Cookie Consent

Cookie Law
For many non-European bloggers, cookies are a part of blogging and all websites use cookies – little data files – to store information in peoples' web browsers. Some websites contain hundreds of them.

However, after an EU Directive in May 2011 giving individuals rights to refuse the use of cookies that reduce their online privacy, everything changed.

Every blogger and site owner is required by EU’s "Cookie Law" to get consent from visitors to store or retrieve any information on a computer, smartphone or tablet whenever their site is access in Europe.

There are other technologies, like Flash and HTML5 Local Storage that do similar things, and these are also covered by the legislation.

The law was designed to protect online privacy, by making consumers aware of how information about them is collected and used online, and give them a choice to allow it or not.

Blogger is proactively complying with EU data protection legislation, but they want publishers to shoulder the bulk of the burden of the user consent policy. However, as a courtesy and convenience they have also added a notice in all their blogs to help meet the regulations.

In the post window, there is a "notice" symbol near the overview, If the user will click that, they will be taken to the full announcement of Blogger.

The notice lets visitors know about Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies on their blog, including Google Analytics and AdSense cookies. Learn about Google’s privacy practices and how Google uses data on partner sites.

If the blogger is outside of the EU, they can view their by changing the country code of their site, for example from nestingbuddy.blogspot.com to nestingbuddy. blogspot.fr or blogspot.co.uk. If the blogger is using a custom domain, they won't see the notice outside of the EU.

The message reads like this:

"This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalize ads and to analyze traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies."
"It’s too early to tell if these changes will fully satisfy EU lawmakers since the final draft has yet to be released or adopted,” said Rob Rasko, CEO and founder of publisher consultancy 614 Group. Taking a forward approach is a "wise course" for Google, Rasko said.

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com.

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