Lots happening behind the scenes and new content added to the site.

We’ve been working on our Cookie policy.

There’s more to this than you might think. Possibly the greatest challenge is to come up with a concise, accurate and easily understandable explanation of what cookies are and what they are capable of.

Irrespective of any legal requirement under GDPR or other privacy regulations, we simply want to be completely transparent and make visitors aware of what cookies that we or third party providers are using and to explain this in terms that would be clear to a non-technical user.

As the GDPR portal is a fairly uncomplicated web site providing information and resources related to the EU’s General Data Protection Legislation, you would think this would be fairly straightforward, right?

Actually, there’s more to your cookie policy than you first might think, and we want to get this right – partly because a site like this should have an exemplary cookie policy and partly because we don’t want to be revisiting this time and again when we could be doing things that are more productive.

We’ve taken advice from the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), Google and others and we’re working towards a comprehensive cookie policy that will be compliant, easy to understand and have a long shelf life.

What we don’t want is to end up with a long, unreadable technical document that might keep the legal department happy, but does nothing for transparency and privacy, which is rather the point.

As well as the text, we’ve included a couple of explainer videos – one from Google and one from the Internet Advertising Bureau on the basis that video is often a quicker and easier way to understand the topic rather than pages of text. We’ve also included links to other resources about cookies for those that are interested in finding out more.

So far we’re coming in at around 500 words which we think is still a bit long, but it is less than a third of the size of Facebook’s new cookie policy. For corporates seeking a template, this will be worth a look – you can bet the finest legal minds have spent a huge number of billable hours poring over every detail – and this particular policy will have been designed to take to court!