{"id":283,"date":"2012-09-06T16:03:26","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T14:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wprealm.com\/?p=283"},"modified":"2017-03-08T17:42:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T16:42:31","slug":"closing-the-cookie-jar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wprealm.local\/closing-the-cookie-jar\/","title":{"rendered":"Closing the Cookie Jar"},"content":{"rendered":"

On June 5 2012, the new Dutch Telecommunications Act came in force. This act is a direct result of a recent EU ‘Cookie’ Directive regarding websites storing information on your computer. For the most part the directive is about the use of cookies<\/a>, but other examples are “HTML5 local storage<\/a>” and “local shared objects<\/a>“. This EU Directive (officially known as the EU Directive 2002\/58 on Privacy and Electronic Communications, otherwise known as the E-Privacy Directive) states in Article 5(3) the following:<\/p>\n

Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information\u2026 about the purposes of the processing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are already a lot of sites discussing and explaining the European directive like Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)<\/a> and All About Cookies<\/a>. You can find tons of information on them like the difference between session- and persistent cookies<\/a>. Apart from the distinction between session and persistent cookies, cookies can also be separated into functional and non-functional cookies. Functional cookies are cookies that are required for the basic operation of your application – most of the time these are also session cookies. Non-functional cookies however are not required for your application to work properly, they are additional and most of the time they only provide an added value for the applications owner. It’s on these last kind of cookies the directive applies. The EU Member States all have their own legislations derived from the EU Directive, they all are slightly divergent amongst themselves.<\/p>\n

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The Dutch Telecommunications Acts deviates from the EU Cookie Directive by being stricter than the EU Directive. The Dutch legislator obliges visitors to opt in at the very moment they enter your website for the first time. The result is that the site is not allowed to store non functional cookies before you received your visitors consent to do so. Since the amendments to the Dutch Telecommunication Act is in force as of June, 2012 a lot of web developers in The Netherlands are currently busy adjusting their websites so they abide the law. Sure, we have some time left, because the Act will only be actively enforced as of January 2013. A lot of sites (including those from our government<\/a>) are not yet compliant. However, some are, and some even deal with the new law in a very humoristic manner, like: Bolletje<\/a> a website from a very renowned Dutch cookie bakery (the consumable kind of cookies).<\/p>\n

For now, I don\u2019t want to dig into the legislation in detail. On the contrary, I like to share some problems I ran into as well as put forward some ideas I had to cope with while dealing with the new regulations as well as using WordPress.<\/p>\n

Acting as application developer for a large Dutch internet company, I was confronted with a challenge, considering the following paradigm:<\/p>\n