The European Cookie Consent Directive aka EU Cookie Directive has been around for a while and now lots of websites are retro fitting their site with the required code to display a notice to all website users that their site uses cookies. The law came into effect in Ireland on 1st July 2011.
Mason Hayes & Curran have a good overview of the Irish implementation of the law on their website. The irishtimes.com has a regular implementation of the directive, as do the rte.ie website, the guinness.com site and the government website www.gov.ie.
Cookiesdirective.com have code in place which is free to use and it deals with the cookie directive requirement. The installation requires a number of pieces of code and together they look inside the PC of a new website visitor to check if the have already consented to having a cookie from that single website installed on their website.
Cookie Lifetime
If they have already consented then they will not see a warning message for a year (i.e. this cookie has a default lifetime of 1 year, and this is configurable so you can extend it for decades) or until they delete all their cookies, which is something that web users regularly do, intentionally or unintentionally.
If the website visitor has not consented to having cookies placed on their PC then they will see the cookie consent warning message. The number of times they see it in a day is configurable too. Once those (for example) five warning message appearances have passed the warning message will not appear again for another 24 hours and then it will be shown another five times.
If the website user consents to having the cookies placed on their PC then a new cookie is installed which has a much longer lifespan e.g. 1 year lifespan, or a 100 year lifespan, which ever you choose. We've tested the code on the apple ipad, iphone and android phones as well as all the major browsers chrome, firefox, opera, safari and internet explorer 9.
No Need To Bother The Web Visitor Again
We have setup our cookie warning to repeat once per day on a visitor's website, and we have set the expiration of the cookie to be 2038 once the web visitor consents to cookies - no need to repeat the cookie consent process with someone who has already consented.
And if the website visitor clears out all the cookies on their PC, as many web users do from time to time, then all their cookies will be deleted and they will have to perform the 'consent to cookies' process on all the websites that they have previously consented on.
If you would like us to install this code for you or provide a custom solution for you then please contact us.
