Hi dondilbert, thanks for downloading my plugin, and thanks for your comments.
I’ve taken the view of ‘implied consent’ over actively blocking cookies. This is for several reasons (not least because the ICO say it’s ok) but mainly because in practice for WordPress website owners, you just can’t guarantee you’re blocking all cookies- it’s not currently technically possible.
You could have a fancy plugin that claims to block cookies until users accept, but under the hood it’s not doing any such thing, or at least not necessarily. For example, if you have 10 plugins on your site, and 4 of them use cookies, you’ll need to re-code 4 plugins to have cookie-blocking technology. There’s no single plugin that can do this for you. This isn’t a massive deal if you know the code, but most WP owners aren’t techies. This isn’t going to happen for them. In fact, they may not even know this is a problem.
So a simple solution is to use implied consent but be very obvious about it – i.e. use a banner like Cookie Law Info. This fully enters into the spirit of the law whilst being practical about how WordPress works.
It’s worth noting that in your examples above you don’t actually need to inform or get consent for strictly necessary cookies. For performance monitoring cookies again, you can’t technically control this for all plugins. You could potentially do this with Google Analytics but personally I don’t think that’s the way to go. I may offer this feature in a paid version though, if there was demand.
I’ll also mention that in WP 3.4 (due this week) there should be a new hook to deal with blog comment cookies (not considered ‘strictly necessary’) – again, my plugin won’t be using this, at least not in the near future. This is because you can get consent for these types of cookies through your website Ts & Cs. Seems silly stripping out core functionality when you can just add a line of text saying “by commenting on our blog you agree to the terms and conditions” (plus update those Ts & Cs, of course)
Hope that sheds some light onto the ethos of my plugin! Thanks again for downloading it.
Richard
