Later this month the EU Cookie law will come into force, this means that before a website can place a cookie on the hard drive of its visitors it must ask for permission. If this is news to you, this video tells you what it means in plain English
Before now, Entirety Media has used website analytics software provided by Google to track web traffic, monitor advertisements and promotional activity and spot errors in our sites. We have temporarily decided to disable Google Analytics whilst we review cookieless alternatives.
To help engage with our users, we have also used Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons, however these services also place several cookies every time you visit a website with their sharing buttons on. Our solution to this has simply been to replace the dynamic like and tweet buttons with simple static images that when clicked open a new window and direct you to share the page on the respective social networks. We feel that this is the best solution as it allows us to provide a similar level of social engagement, albeit with a higher degree of friction, whilst removing the facility for social networks to track users. The only exception to this rule is within the member are of Free Coin which requires cookies to be placed for the site to function (more on this later), within the member area is a ‘like box’ which displays our latest activity on Facebook. We took the decision to leave this in because it provides an important method of communication with our users and gives them the ability to open dialogue with us.
Other third parties that have provided ‘badges’ or other similar content to our sites have had their content removed or edited so load a static image that we host on our own servers. This not only removes their ability to place cookies on our users’ computers, but also helps our pages load faster.
As mentioned earlier, the members area within Free Coin still requires cookies to work, this is because we place cookies to store session IDs to allow the user to stay logged in when they move from page to page, a message will appear on screen asking our users to approve the placing of cookies before this happens. The data that we store is anonymous and simply keeps a user logged in, an example string would be: ‘jdhf983754hfa7h3rn83R24‘.
Entirety Media uses a DNS caching and Content Delivery Network system provided by CloudFlare. This service is vital to the optimum running of our websites as it allows our sites to load faster, protects us against attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS) and helps to keep the websites live even if our servers crash. CloudFlare places session cookies to ensure that the fastest and most reliable service is offered. In short, this is because known ‘dangerous IP addresses’ are shown a challenge page before they access our websites, they’re required to pass a CAPTCHA test and a cookie must be placed to ensure that they don’t have to pass this test on every page. These cookies are anonymous and again only contain session data, however they are vital for the operation of our websites and unfortunately are placed before pages load, therefore we cannot ask permission prior to them being placed.
We will be updating our privacy and cookie policies to reflect all of our latest changes in the coming weeks, following this the final stages of implementation will be completed and we will be complying with this rather difficult law.