Cookie/Privacy/GDPR Policies
The astute of you may have noticed that there are ZERO policies on this site. The simple reason why, is that this site has NO Google analytics, NO Social Media add-ons, NO COMMENTS or even a place to register! Under the Cookie/GDPR, I don’t need to add these, as there is zip all you can do with this site. It’s purely for information, and doesn’t harvest any data at all!
However, just a heads up with WordPress blogging – to have comments, best practice is to have people to have accounts – this is simple spam protection – especially as you can approve the first post to legitimise the comment. Here is where it gets interesting.
It’s not as simple as enabling comments and registering, you need a privacy policy, AND because people need to log into your site, you are creating a session cookie. As you are asking for people’s names/emails, these are stored in a database, therefore, you need to be GDPR compliant. This means that a Privacy policy needs to be added, AND a cookie control banner added to the site too…
My mum and her visitors to her site now have these. It’s taken me 5 hours to get this correct. The Cookie Policy I know will NEVER be read, but has to have the correct information on it! (YAY) Also, I have to make sure that there is a proper banner with a link. Where I KNOW the only thing people will do is click OK. – I did add Google Analytics too as if you are going to add comments, you might as well add a second cookie – it’s only another paragraph!!!
Bit of disclosure where it comes down to Cookies.
Your first is your session/permanent cookie
This is a created when you log into an account and is destroyed when you log out of an account. It is also there to keep track of, let’s say what you have added in your shopping basket on a website. Pretty cool eh. So yes these are necessary.
The next two are Third Party Cookies
Your tracking cookie.
This usually is Google Analytics, it takes note of your IP address, what Operating System you are using and what browser. Sounds creepy, but for most developers, this shows WHERE your visitors are from (why we need the IP address) – and The OS and browsers are simply so you can develop your site accordingly. This is what it SHOULD be used for.
Advertising Cookie.
This is created via Facebook and other Social Media platforms – if you have not logged out of Facebook, and traipse around the web looking for things, expect to come back to Facebook with targeted adverts from your browsing history. THESE Cookies are the ones that give the previous two a bad name!
There are others, but I don’t want to scare you!
