Comprehensive GDPR-compliant cookie management is complimentary with Empower Ideas
Do you have a cookie management tool? Do you need one? For many websites, the answer is yes. Cookie management tools give users the opportunity to opt out of your website cookies, thereby helping to fulfill your obligations under privacy legislation such as GDPR and CCPA. If you collect any information about your website visitors, including for an email list or even using Google Analytics, you may need such a tool, even if you aren't located in the EU or California.
Cookie management and privacy more generally can be very complex. Large companies often employ a team of lawyers tasked with writing and managing policies for each jurisdiction in which the company may be liable. Your company may not have that level of resources.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t typically excuse businesses from complying with privacy laws. And increasingly, consumers are demanding such compliance from companies that they choose to do business with.And morally, allowing users to opt out of certain data-sharing practices, and helping users understand how their data is used, is a sort of bare minimum given that the internet has evolved past the point of an “opt-in” mechanism that might otherwise be more consumer-friendly.
There are several third-party tools that can help with this problem. Some of the most popular include Termageddon, Lubenda, andTermly. They all work similarly: answer some questions about your business, connect your website, and then the provider keeps the policies updated as laws evolve over time.
These policies may include privacy policies, end user license agreements (EULA), cookie management policies, and more. They live on dedicated pages on your website. We recommend linking to them from your website footer, which helps to keep them accessible but unintrusive. These policies are added to your site dynamically, and the text is hosted remotely. (However, the actual page still lives on your own site and adopts your own branding. There is no branding for Empower Ideas or the terms policy providers) In this way, there is nothing more for you to do after installation. The pages will automatically and dynamically update whenever necessary.
Empower Ideas has partnered with Termageddon for several years, and all of our retainers (including our Base Plan for $49 per month) include a free license to their excellent privacy policy manager. It is important to note that neither Termageddon nor Empower Ideas are law firms; however, this tool makes it easy to manage your legal requirements and may help to reduce your need for more expensive outside legal work. Termageddon’s policies are written to legal standard and update automatically whenever the laws change.
Additionally, Termageddon now includes a cookie management program called Usercentrics at no extra cost. Usercentrics contains a cookie consent policy and a consent modal that can appear on your site, helping to keep users in control and you in compliance.
Usercentrics accommodates up to 20,000 site visitors per month with your Empower Ideas 1 Simple Subscription. It works by presenting a bar at the bottom of your website that allows users to opt into cookies. Most users will typically accept in order to clear the bar as simply as possible. The goal of the bar is to be unintrusive, allowing users to continue to browse your website and even convert, but to exist with the goal of meeting your legal requirements.
If you already have 1 Simple Subscription fromEmpower Ideas, reach out to your project manager to add Termageddon and Usercentrics at no additional cost. Or, sign up for 1 Simple Subscription now. Read more about Termageddon and their new cookie management solution, Usercentrics, here.