How will the EU cookie directive affect European Bloggers?

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know I'm a bit of a technophobe! What you may not know is that I have a real aversion to rules and regulations, and I hate red tape and complicated documents. I recently had to sign a collaboration and confidentiality agreement with a European Union body, and stabbing myself is the eyes would have been less painful for me than wading through that document!

Fortunately, I have friends!

Friends like Graham, who wrote the post below, and who has an uncanny knack for reading and understanding all the crap complicated documents produced by our beloved masters. And luckily enough for me, Graham is one of the bloggers inside The Beyond Blogging Project, so his help is always at hand for those of us who spend time there. Over to him:

Anyone who has read my recent series on "Blogging in Germany" will know that the country does not make it easy for me - either as a blogger or as a business website owner. The one thing that most people outside the country know about is that I am not allowed to use Google Analytics on my sites. The reason usually given is that Analytics allows profiling of visitors across multiple sites, so effectively Google can follow someone from one website to another and create a profile of them to deliver relevant advertising. Of course, website owners can also use the information to see how people move around their sites.

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Until now, that has not really bothered anyone else in Europe - it has been a German problem.

Until now.

Because the European Union has come up with an "e-Privacy directive" which requires websites to gain "explicit consent" before storing tracking cookies - and probably making a complete mess of any business website that adheres to the rules. The rule becomes law in the EU on 25^th May 2011.

Before we even consider bloggers, let's just for a moment think of the simple implications on major websites. When you buy something online, you probably use a shopping cart. That cart is often stored in a cookie, so that you can add something to your cart whilst browsing a website, and then order it all at the end of your visit.

No cookie, no shopping cart. But instead of just accepting that that's the way it works, everyone will be asked if they agree to the cookie being stored. If you agree, that's fine. If not, well then you may have to enter all of the items by hand into a blank form I guess.

That's not really the store's problem, but where are they supposed to save the information that you don't want that cookie stored, if not in an anonymous cookie?

What about a company website that would like to welcome its new visitors on their first visit with a special message (aka. lightbox)? Will the lightbox have to look like the welcome screen to a Windows program with a checkbox to "don't show this again" - with a warning message to say that if you tick the box, a cookie will be stored to show that you were on the site?

Why oh why did the EU not limit the ruling to storing personal data in the cookie, such as a name or e-mail address?

Why can't people just configure their browsers to block cookies, if they want to surf the internet that way, instead ruining the experience for everyone else?

Of course there are other ways of tracking visitors to a website, but these are either more geared to e-commerce sites or use session IDs in the URLs - making them less secure that the cookies. After all, a session ID is transmitted - usually unencrypted - across the internet. A cookie is only stored on the user's computer.

So how will this affect bloggers?

Well, since a lot of bloggers use lightboxes, that would be an obvious place to start. Then there are the cookies that WordPress, Drupal etc. save when a visitor lands on a site, the cookies that comment systems like Disqus save, and so on.

Of course, anyone earning a living with their blog will also be either selling products, services, or at the very least using affiliate links. Well, those links want to be tracked, so that the blogger receives their commission. Checking my own browser's cookie cache, I immediately found cookies for 1ShoppingCart, e-junkie and Clickbank.

And since the first thing any serious blogger does is to add a sign-up form, you might be interested to know that my cache had over 100 Aweber cookies in it!

Let's just imagine what happens when someone - regardless of where they are from - lands on your site. They dismiss the lightbox, but don't check the box so the lightbox appears on every post they visit. Will they stay? Even if they do, you have to ask permission before storing a cookie. No more Google Analytics then. But at least they read your stuff, and follow your advice, and eventually sign up to a major blogging course. Great for them, great for the course seller, but bad fr you - because if the sale can't be tracked, then you've just lost a commission.

Yes, this means that our follow bloggers elsewhere - like in the U.S. - are going to have the competitive edge, because even their FCC rules aren't this bad!

We need to make our blogging voices heard. We need to write to our MPs. We need to get this ridiculous directive overturned.

Let's get together and do something about it, before there isn't a next level to take our blogs to!

Fellow European Bloggers, it's over to you.

Graham Tappenden is a self-employed IT consultant and British ex-pat living in Germany. He blogs about his life in Germany at AllThingsGerman.net and is a founder member of the Beyond Blogging Project.

Note from Mike: This is a small example of the kind of stuff we tackle in The Beyond Blogging Project. We're a small group of bloggers, who run businesses using our blogs as the marketing platform. We work with each other, help and advise each other and we all benefit from the power of the group. Why not join us? Beyond Blogging Project