GDPR compliant? It seems not :-(

Hi Thorsten! ( @per4mance )

Thank you for your post! It’s great to hear you like Buttonizer! I’d like to clarify how Buttonizer uses cookies on your websites and is following the GDPR. Please let me know if you have any further questions/additional notes.

The cookie law forces website owners to inform visitors about cookies they set that concerns the privacy of the visitor. Functional cookies that make the website work better without any privacy concerns are excluded from that law.

The Buttonizer cookie you are talking about is only for functional use, we do not store that information in your database or anywhere else. Also it’s not possible to track the visitor using the cookie as it’s only contains a boolean or timestamp, no unique user identifier is set or read.

The javascript frontend is the only part in the application that uses those cookies to interact with the menus an admin created.

Only in some situations a cookie is set
Also, the functional cookies will only be set if a Buttonizer admin uses one of the following functions in Buttonizer:
– Open Buttonizer menu by default at first page load (boolean, feature in Buttonizer Free)
– Show Buttonizer menu after several amount of seconds (timestamp, feature in Buttonizer Pro)
– Buttonizer exit intent, when set on ‘only once per session’. (Sessioncookie, timestamp, feature in Buttonizer Pro)

In all other situations no cookies are set.

So we do not store any personal information in that cookie and Buttonizer does not track users by itself.

Site owners decision
It’s up to the website admin what they do with the cookies, if they read the cookies in the backand and do other things with them then we’ve intended, then they should inform their users and ask for permission before they do that.

When you use Buttonizer in a correct way, Buttonizer is following the GDPR.

Also, because of your post I’ve created a knowledgebase topic that clarifies the use of cookies by Buttonizer: https://community.buttonizer.pro/knowledgebase/164

Let me know if this clarifies everything about how Buttonizer uses cookies ??

By the way, it’s interesting, sad and a bit scary to see that the EU website has no kind of SSL certificate for such an important website…

Hi @buttonizer,

Thank you very much for going into the details of setting cookies by your plugin. If the basic cookie is set to “functional”, than I’m going to inform the team of the Complianz plugin because their cookiedatabase.org do not know till yet what your plugin really does.

The issue we have with the case-law above is, that the German authority has a more strict interpretation of the GDPR. I already discussed this with Complianz. I’m not happy with it but it seems Germany follows the European rights more by local legislative power.

To protect privacy rights will be very very important in the near future, and if you keep an eye on the German market you should be aware of this. For this I collaborate with authorized developers, e.g. Complianz, to get the best for German customers.

Thank you for taking time to get into the details!

Best regards,
Thorsten

PS: And you’re right with the European website and their cookie setting. In German exists a latin saying and I’m sure you know it too: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. That’s why they have obviously more rights ??

Hi Thorsten! ( @per4mance )

Thanks for your quick reply! And I appreciate the efforts of your message and the information you give us. Are you able to let us know what the outcome is of Complianz as soon they’ve replied to you?

We didn’t knew that Germany has a more strict interpretation of the GDPR, but that’s a good thing to know!

We’ll make it more clear in our dashboard interface in the future when someone will turn on a setting that uses a certain cookie to be functional (just as a notice). But most of the times Buttonizer won’t set any cookie, so it realy depends on the Buttonizer settings that the site is using.

If you have any other feedback, let us know!

Cheers!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Buttonizer.

Hi Thorsten (@per4mance) and @buttonizer,

This post came to our attention and I’d like to respond.

Over the last 12 months we’ve worked on our free to use and community-driven Cookiedatabase. We’ve built the database not only to deliver better cookie descriptions in the Complianz generated cookie policies, but also to create better insight in cookie usage in general.

We’ve currently looked into over 250 services and plugins, commonly used by WordPress (and Complianz) users. Thorsten notified me that Buttonizer cookies are not yet in the database (shame on us!). While these cookies might be categorized as ‘functional’, all websites that use Buttonizer should mention and describe them on their Cookie Policies for GDPR and CCPA compliance.

I’d like to invite @buttonizer to commit the information (like retention and function) to the database, so all Buttonizer and Complianz users can communicate correct and validated cookie information on their Cookie Policies. We add a ‘Validated’ sign at these pages when a plugin developer committed or checked the cookies placed by their own tool.

Thanks in advance. For any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out at our website or the Support Forum.

Kind Regards,

Leon
Complianz Privacy Suite