I’ve written and published an update about the new cookie / privacy regulations on the GDS blog. We recently held a meeting of people who look after government websites to talk about the intent behind the new regulations and what we should be doing to ensure that people’s privacy remains at the forefront of how we implement the changes.
An extract is below, and you can read the full post on the GDS blog.
…the new regulations have pushed online privacy firmly into the spotlight and this is no bad thing. In fact this online privacy was the focus of a meeting last week of UK government website managers, developers, policy advisers and communications experts. The meeting was hosted by GDS so that people with responsibility for the operation of central government departments’ and agencies’ websites could discuss and learn from one another about some of the ways we could work towards compliance with the new regulations.
We talked about cookies (how could we not?) but we didn’t get hung up on them - other relevant technologies e.g. HTML5 Local Storage and web beacons came up too. We shared our experiences of comprehensively auditing our sites in order to be certain we knew which cookies were being set by us or via our sites (in the case of third-party cookies).