Richard

An additional point- you do not need to get consent for cookies that are “strictly necessary” for the proper operation of your website. The core WordPress install is such a case. Google Analytics cookies however, are not considered “strictly necessary” but are in a low-intrusion category.

See:
https://www.international-chamber.co.uk/components/com_wordpress/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/icc_uk_cookie_guide.pdf

Overall, I see (understandably!) a great deal of confusion amongst website owners when it comes to understanding the implications of this law. People are rushing to block cookies, or put up intrusive banners to capture consent prior to visitors using their site. There are alternative approaches which are also acceptable.

Hi there, thanks for the feedback! Good suggestion about the icon and the cookie, I’ll add that option in:

“When you dismiss the header, it will disappear with no drop-down tab shown. If you delete the cookie that controls it, the header will be shown again.”

Let me know if you have other requests as I’m working on another round of development.

I’ll be making a release later today with a new shortcode to display the cookies you do collect in a neat table. There are several table designs available, and you can further customise it with your own via CSS.

Hi Candy2012, hi pates,

In the next version of the plugin I’ve updated the documentation to explain the rationale behind this plugin. It has been designed to be ‘opinionated’ – in the sense that it is not trying to be all things for all men. This plugin provides the website admin with a simply and clean way show visitors what the privacy and cookie policy is. It quite deliberately does not block cookies.

The view within the online marketing / ecommerce community is that a disruptive banner will lead to visitor dropout, i.e. currently most internet users don’t know what a cookie is or why it might be used. They will click “no” and you either lose visitors or valuable analytics. The ICO themselves ran a similar approach and received just 10% opt-in and their traffic stats (controlled by a cookie) were down 90%. From a website owner’s point of view that is a huge issue and so alternative implementations have been sought.

The industry response so far has been to assess your website for cookie use then to take a view on “implied consent” (where just by using your site the visitor is implied to have accepted your privacy policy). The current best practice, as advised by the likes of Econsultancy and provided as an option in the Government’s own materials, is to use a form of implied consent that clearly makes your policy visible to visitors through a link in the header.

This plugin takes that opinion.

See:
https://econsultancy.com/us/blog/9453-econsultancy-s-solution-to-eu-e-privacy-directive-compliance
https://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/03/19/its-not-about-cookies-its-about-privacy/
https://www.johnlewis.com – see how they are doing it (very interesting)

Assuming you are not deliberately breaching visitor privacy (in which case the ICO are rightly coming after you…) then this approach will keep you off the radar of the ICO, whilst still providing the required privacy to your visitor and not causing your site to lose traffic.

The ICO will surely improve their communication about how the law will be implemented, and we will continue to monitor the situation and update this plugin accordingly. In the admin panel of this plugin there’s an option to sign up for such news. It’s non-spam, only news how this WordPress plugin can be used to help you.

I hope that helps clarify a few things.

Thanks again for evaluating this plugin.