The EU cookie policy and its non-existent design unity is driving me crazy
It’s one of those half-assed things that should be easy enough to fix but nobody bothers — I’m talking about the EU cookie policy.
It’s been years since you — theoretically — should display one of those annoying cookie banners on your website. Not a lot of websites bother with the implementation because they know that nobody is checking up on them.
Now, something happened: Google is forcing some website owners to implement a cookie banner. The company wrote sometime last year that customers of AdSense, DoubleClick and other services had to comply with the EU cookie law by September 30th, 2015.
Well, most website still lack the banner — and it’s 2016 already. Thankfully, many have implemented it this year. I’ve noticed this in the last months, because I visit many [new and old] websites every day. What I immediately noticed was how inconsistent the design, positioning and wording was. It actually started to annoy me.
3 examples how not to implement the EU cookie policy
Let me show you what I mean by annoying:
On the website bauen.de, you can see the cookie banner at the top. These things seem off to me:
- Why isn’t the gray color matching the other nuances on the website?
- Who thought it would be a good idea to pick a light gray color and use a white font?
- That black underlined OK-button looks out of place.
Need another one? Let’s go:
On tion.ro the banner and the red accept-button match the design of the website. So far so good, but:
- The font is not very readable, it needs to have a more weight and be darker.
- What you can’t see from the screenshot is the fact that you accept the terms by scrolling down.
Now, the second point is something I’m not okay with. You cannot force your terms on somebody without notifying him of his actions. How hard is it to put something like this in the banner?
By scrolling down on our website, you automatically accept our terms.
Very, it seems.
And let’s go with a third example:
The guys at The Guardian thought it would be enough to tell people to read the cookies policy. If you find that message annoying, there’s even a close button just for you.
- Thankfully, the banner matches the website’s design.
- Unfortunately, there is no message that tells visitors that they accept the terms by browsing the website.
How does a good cookie bar look like? Well, that depends on your point of view, obviously. I quite like the implementation of cookieBAR by Emanuele Toscano, whom I’ve provided with a Romanian translation by the way. His implementation looks like this:
When you click on the details-button on the bottom, you get a nice pop-over that tells you all there is to know about cookies, further information and links how to disable cookies in different browsers.
Even better: The script checks the language defined in the web browser and shows a translated version.
On the cookieBAR website, you can configure the plug-in yourself. What was important to us:
- It has to be very visible, therefore we went with the grey color (you can choose between black [default], grey and white.
- There should be information about how to block cookies in different browsers.
- The cookie banner should be available in multiple languages.
Forcing people to accept your terms
Yes, I know, how can anybody force you to do anything? Well, let’s say a website has a cookie banner implemented at the bottom of the page. Traditionally, that’s where the footer is — and links like Terms of Service, Contact, and so on. I have seen tons of cases where the cookie banner hid those links, which means that you have two options:
- accept the terms and read the ToS
- leave the website
Both cases are not really the best way to deal with this issue. The second leaves website owners with a high bounce rate, the first is bad practice.
As you can see above, we use a cookie bar on our website contentkraft.rocks that sits at the bottom but doesn’t hide anything important. Visitors are still able to read our ToS and gather the information they need.
Banners that are only visible on certain pages
Another thing I’ve seen in the past weeks are very odd implementations of cookie banners. Some only show up on certain pages — the home page for example. If you don’t accept the cookies and simply surf to another page, the banner vanishes without you having accepted the terms.
On one website I wasn’t greeted by the cookie banner at all until I visited one specific article. Every webmaster should make sure that the banner shows up every time on every page until it’s been clicked.
Why is there no universal cookie implementation?
What annoys me the most about the cookie policy is a missing universal implementation. Everybody uses a self-made implementation that looks different from the one on other websites; it contains different information and has a different position: Sometimes it’s at the top, sometimes at the bottom, occasionally it’s even in a corner.
Defining the cookie law should have been a bigger hurdle than to provide a universal script that every website has to embed. The EU actually has some form of implementation called the Cookie Consent Kit, which sadly is nothing more than a Word document (.doc) explaining what cookies are, translated [partly] into multiple languages.
Let’s annoy people who have cookies deactivated
Some people on the internet value their privacy and have cookies disabled. Those people are probably more annoyed by cookie banners than me. Every time they visit a website, they see a cookie banner. Because their cookies are deactivated, it pops up every time they access a website, over and over.
Of course, nobody thought of people who are not accepting cookies by choice. Yet, they have to click those banners anyway. The funny thing is: They might click I accept, although they don’t, but it’s the only way to make the banner go away.
This is a fundamental flaw in this entire implementation which is supposed to protect consumers. Instead, all it does is annoy them. Yes, there is an addon called I don’t care about cookies that hides cookie bars. But nobody should have to install add-ons to get rid of things that are supposed to help the average Joe.
Picture sources
Padurariu Alexandru | Unsplash
Screenshots were taken from the websites with the build-in OS X function
