Your website needs to abide by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive (ePR) if you wish to have visitors from the European Union. These two laws establish the legal, secure way of processing personal data from your users, which is by acquiring cookie consent from them.
Today, we focus on the best way to employ cookie consent on your website and to ensure that between your website and your users is a legal connection.
What is Cookie Consent?
Cookie consent is the user’s acceptance of sharing some of their data in exchange for using a website.
Almost every website out there is using cookie tracking, and if they don’t, there is third-party software that does anyway. These cookies are files that contain the user’s location, IP address, name, email, and sometimes their behavior on that particular site. They are essential for producing statistics that measure the website’s performance and for improving the user’s experience on their return visit.
According to The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive (ePR), any user from the European Union has to be presented with a banner or a form through which he or she gives their consent for the website to collect, store and use those cookies for legal, transparent purposes.
Why you need Cookie Consent for your website
When you use cookie tracking on your website, cookie consent is the prerequisite that makes this process legal.
Cookies only activate after the user has given his or her consent. Without it, you are engaging in illegal activity according to the GDPR and the ePR.
Your cookie consent mechanism has to give users a priority of decision before continuing on your website. It has to be transparent, unambiguous, documentable, and reversible. It means that visitors must have the option to review their consent and withdraw it at any time.
What is the Best Way to Employ Cookie Consent?
Implementing a cookie consent system may seem like a daunting task, especially for beginners. Fortunately, there are easy and efficient software programs that do that for you. Furthermore, the best ones come in the form of a customizable plugin that you can easily employ on your website.
Cookiebot is a cloud-driven mechanism that helps websites comply with GDPR legislation. It is a safe and easy solution for controlling cookies and trackers while allowing users to opt-out of certain forms of tracking.
With Cookiebot you get a full cookie management solution that enables your website to collect and store user data consensually and legally. You can use this software-as-a-service tool to:
- Engage in a legal connection with your website’s visitors
- Give users prior cookie consent before continuing on your site
- Allow visitors to choose what type of information they are willing to share
- Enable users to review and even withdraw their cookie consent whenever they want
Even as paid software, Cookiebot manages to be one of the most used tools that developers employ to ensure that web applications and websites conform to GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive.
