By , Consultant
If you own or manage a website and you don’t yet know that you need to comply with the UK privacy legislation (aka The Cookie Law), you’re probably in the wrong job.
The law was passed last May but UK websites have been granted an additional year by the Information Commissioners Office (or the ICO, the body enforcing the law in the UK) to implement this. If you don’t get up to speed and take the necessary steps, you will be liable for a fine of up to £500,000.
You have until the 25th May 2012 to become complaint, and time is running out.
What does it all mean?
In essence, it is now a legal requirement that you ask for consent (opt-in) if your site uses cookies (small packets of data). However, to confuse matters, if a cookie is “strictly necessary” for the site to function (such as for a shopping basket) you “might” not have to ask for consent. But what does “strictly necessary” and “might” mean?
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By Craig Cartwright, Technical Architect
Well it’s the end of an era for Google Analytics: come end of January 2012 they plan to replace the current interface we have all learnt to love and use with the new dashboard and features that they’ve been promoting for a while (Some may have already jumped shipped to the new interface as we’ve all had the chance for a while to change to the new!).
So what does this actually mean for all of us? And is it time to panic? Well I’d like to think that it’s nothing too serious to worry about, and for most, it will all be fine. But for some of the regular users like me that use some of the more obscure reports, it does mean some annoyance as they are being laid to rest (RIP).
But before running for the hills (or the likes of other great analytics packages such as Mint, etc.) be aware that some of these reports can still be found – but in the strangest of places – namely as “secondary dimensions” or via “advanced segments” for some of the traditional reports. As per the old interface these act as additional “parameters” for filtering reports. For example, the great old screen resolutions reports is now stored/shown as a secondary dimension in the browser report.
So what’s the hype or moan about? Well, with my like for spaghetti westerns – here’s my take on the good, the bad and the plain ugly….
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