You’re throwing your visitors to the lions - but Europe won’t let you

Trackers. Counters. Ads. Retargeters. All of them install cookies in your visitors backs. You allow advertisers gathering extensive and intrusive information about your visitors, their habits, their lives.

Google, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok and the likes probably know about every page I visited – be it a site about a deity, a diet or a date.

Crumbs itch.

The GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive and other European regulations fight these cookies, because they expose citizens’ privacy. So Europe impose new rules and banners, which annoy everybody – most people feel they suck. But…

Do you really need these cookies?

Cookies belong to three categories: advanced, statistics, or harmless. Which ones do you use?

1/ Some web sites really need cookies

If you chose to display ads on your web site to monetize your visitors, to buy ads, or if your business model requires advanced marketing techniques: real-time information, retargeting…, then you need cookies.

So you must ask your visitors for their free, specific, informed and unambiguous consent – which happens through a dreaded popup.

Consent required - thumbup Fat banner or popup required - info-circle

2/ Informational, corporate web sites: which depth of analytics?

When it comes to counting your visitors or pageviews, analyzing the technical logs is not a practical solution – so most companies use “analytics” solutions to get insights.

Advanced analytics

80% of all websites use Google Analytics: it’s super powerful, full of functions, easy to use. Their landing page displays: “Reach your goals with powerful digital analytics – for free. Get insight into every step of your customer’s journey on your website, then use analytics to elevate your impact”. Who would resist such a promise?

Well, where is the catch?

Sure, you won’t pay money to use it, but it’s not free – all these servers and code cost Google money, and they’re not a philantropy. So, undisclosedly, you trade this information for your users’ data.

By EU laws, your visitors and users have to give their say to be traded this way. So, for Google Analytics, all US solutions for statistics, and probably other advanced solutions:

Consent required - thumbup Fat banner or popup required - info-circle

(Remember, consent to cookies can’t be presumed - see actions from the good folks at NOYB on this)

Furthermore, using non–EU–based analytics solutions also generates its class of legal risks.

Alternative analytics

However, do you really use all this fancy information about funnels, retargeting, churn rate, custom metrics…? They’re nice to have, “I will exploit them some day”, but do you exploit them now ? Aren’t your turnover and your margins the ultimate tools to measure whether your strategy is successful?

Or, are you thinking about avoiding displaying disruptive cookies popups?

There are tools beyond Google Analytics – sure, they’re not gratis, but they offer better guarantees for your visitors’ freedoms.

In 2021, the French Data Protection Authority, the CNIL, issued a (somewhat limited) list of tools. If / when these tools are correctly configured to get only basic stats, from your servers, providing information suffices.

Consent optional, under conditions - thumbup Information banner optional, under conditions - info-circle

Since 2018, some innovative European startups have designed privacy-abiding or privacy-advocating solutions for analytics, which use no cookies and collect just core, but still useful, data.

Are your visitors customers, or products? Wouldn’t it be nice to proudly announce people that you respect them?

No consent required - thumbup Information banner is sufficient - info-circle

3/ Merchant sites

If your visitors can log in your site, if they buy stuff, then you hardly can do without cookies: such necessary, “technical” cookies are necessary to circumvent the web’s limitations.

European regulations consider these technical cookies as harmless and do allow them. They don’t require user’s consent, so you only have to inform your visitors about them.

No consent required - thumbup Information banner is sufficient - info-circle

Privacy Advocates tell you: Free Your Users – Now

If you only need standard statistics, you probably don’t need cookies.
You can choose to quit cookies – and annoying banners and popups altogether.

No-Cookies.eu advocates a movement to stop using cookies. By joining the movement,

  • you stop bothering your users,
  • you tell them you respect them — or, don’t be shy, that you them
  • you display your commitment to freedom.

Step – choose your side

First, analyse if you can get rid of tracking cookies. If you need only basics stats, you probably can.

Leaving Google analytics can be difficult – not technically, but your colleagues will drag their feet: technical team (“this gives us extra work”), marketing (“we’re going to lose our 360° vision”), legal (“according to our research, this change might or might not alleviate our risk”).

Be persuasive, and a Privacy Defender.

Step – choose a respectful solution

We have evaluated these solutions and we know they comply with the GDPR:

Wikipedia lists more tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software

We have choosen https://simpleanalytics.com/ for our web sites.

If you have found another cookie-free solution, e-mail us and we’ll add it.

Step – grab this html code (includes the logo) and install it on your web site

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    <a target="_new" href="https://www.no-cookies.eu">
    <span style="display:inline-block; font-size:4em; position:relative; vertical-align:-0.125em; height:1em; width:1.25em;">
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      </svg>
      <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 640 512" style="color:#f5365c; overflow:visible; box-sizing:content-box; transform:scaleX(-1); margin: auto; position:absolute; bottom:0; left:0; right:0; top:0; transform-origin:center center; display:inline-block; height:1em; vertical-align:-0.125em;"><!--! Font Awesome Pro 6.1.1 by @fontawesome - https://fontawesome.com License - https://fontawesome.com/license (Commercial License) Copyright 2022 Fonticons, Inc. -->
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      </svg>
    </span>
  </a>
</div>

Step – Ditch your current Analytics solution

<a target="https://www.no-cookies.eu">Ditch Your Cookies</a>

Added bonus

  1. You will sleep better.
  2. You will be a Privacy Hero.
  3. Tell us why and how you ditched cookies and joined the movement – if you consent, we might publish your testimony, and offer some Privacy Hero Tee-Shirts in the future.

FAQ

Q: Who makes this?

Cabinet Cilex, a french consultancy on Privacy matters.

You can read our thoughts about privacy and GDPR on our blog (in French).

Q: Why do you do this?

In Privacy We Believe.

Also, we discussed this No Cookies topic with other privacy-minded activists and they agreed it would be a nice thing.

Q: How do you make money?

We edit Provacy, a complete tool to manage GDPR compliance. We sell it as a SaaS service (for a fair price). We don’t sell our user’s data.

Resources on this web site are free (as in free beer).

We encourage you to adhere to this movement and promote it.

Q: Do you offer consulting on these matters?

Sorry, no more. But we know three or four things about privacy and GDPR, so you can try to get in touch if you have questions, we’re always happy to help.