BenTasker.co.uk

Contrary to the belief of some, the EU E-Privacy Directive was never about stopping cookies. It was always about raising awareness of what they are, which ones are set and how they can be misused. It was, and still is, a cause of annoyance for many - especially as only four member states have currently adopted the provisions.

Whilst I don't think the implementation was correct, the underlying principle is sound - we should be ensuring users are aware of what data we're storing in their browser and how it's used. Most sites, in my opinion, don't go nearly far enough to achieve this, instead just scraping the minimum standard.

In this post, we'll be exploring what I think we're doing wrong, and what we should be aiming for.

mod_yourData is a Joomla! module allowing you to show site visitors exactly what data your site is storing within their browser. It includes support for Cookies, Session Storage Objects and Local Storage Objects. Given ever-increasing awareness of Privacy online, it's important that sites are as transparent as possible.

The ideal use of this module would be to assign it to a custom position and then include with your site's Privacy statement using Joomla's LoadPosition plugin.

This page is the user documentation for the module, you can also view the Demo here

Virya Cookie Monster is a Virya Software project intended to help Joomla! sites achieve compliance with the European PECR (otherwise known in the UK as 'the cookie law'). It presents either a banner of a lightbox, and can optionally give the visiting user the option to reject all cookies.

The module uses Joomla!s ACL system to help prevent cookies from being set. The extension also includes a script that checks installed extensions against a black-list to see if any are known to set cookies

The items below are currently stored in your browser by BenTasker.co.uk, click an item to delete it - some may be re-set when you next visit a page. Some additional items are likely to have been set by other services, you can reduce the number of these by blocking the social media icons (you'll need to leave the LocalStorage object blockSocials set).