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Directive on Privacy in Drupal 7.x

I would have liked to use an amazing title like “Different Countries need different privacy rules”, but it could have been wrong and not summarized the content of this article. After all the Directive 2002/58/EC and 2009/136/EC are not only related to UK but also to the whole European Community. Go ahead and you will find some descriptions about the Drupal modules that can help you to deal with this EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications.

In these last months I have visited a lot of website located in UK (i.e. the Internet country code top-level domain is .uk) and all of them present an annoying message that informs visitors about the cookie policy. I thought that was just a pleasant message which explained the rights of users... Also because I have never read a similar one in the Italian sites. However this is not put for pleasure, but in order to follow the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, also known as 2002/58/EC and amended by Directive 2009/136/EC, that came into effect in the UK on 26th May 2012 (in Italy on 28th May 2012).

Nowadays cookie consent requirements have been adopted in 24 out of 30 EEA Member States. If you want to know what are the major differences in how each state interprets the cookie law, you can read Cookies Tracking Table released by Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP. The Directive amends Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC (“e-Privacy Directive”) to introduce new rules for online service providers that require them to obtain visitors’ “consent” before serving cookies and similar tracking devices to users’ computers. In particular, this table identifies whether strict ‘opt-in’ consent requirements apply in each Member State (i.e. prior, express, informed consent) or whether consent can be inferred, for example, through appropriate browser/application settings or other means. Finally it has been updated on 4th February 2013.

Unfortunately my website uses Drupal and Google Analytics to collect user information, so I had to adapt this law me too.

In Drupal 7.x there are 2 different modules to do this:

I have chosen the first because it implements a sub-module which disables Google Analytics and a number of JavaScript functions that allow you to check if you can set cookies from the rest of your scripts. While the second has only two advantages: it supports Drupal 6.x and multilingual websites but it doesn't permit to disable the cookies (it only gives an advise).

Cookies are on Cookies are off
Cookies are on Cookies are off

You can solve the localization adding some translations in the Cookie Control configuration page (http://my_site/admin/config/people/cookiecontrol), below there are some pictures that describe how I implemented the localization and the configuration options of this module:

Cookie Control configuration menu (part 1 of 3) Cookie Control configuration menu (part 2 of 3) Cookie Control configuration menu (part 3 of 3)
Configuration menu (part 1 of 3) Configuration menu (part 2 of 3) Configuration menu (part 3 of 3)

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Nicola Rainiero

A civil geotechnical engineer with the ambition to facilitate own work with free software for a knowledge and collective sharing. Also, I deal with green energy and in particular shallow geothermal energy. I have always been involved in web design and 3D modelling.