Many of us probably heard the EU Cookie Law already and thinking about "what to do" and many others should be saying: "cookie what?".
What is it?
It is a European Union e-Privacy Directive that will become active on 26th May 2012 and "requires website owners to take the permission of the user before placing anything (cookies, HTML5 local storage..) to their computer for tracking them (cookies exist in analytics apps, many sign-up/login pages, widgets, etc.).
Which websites need to take action?
It binds any EU-located individual and organization’s website, no matter where the website is hosted at. Some EU countries are already applying it and UK will begin to enforce it by 26th May 2012 (also, websites breaking the law can be fined up to £500,000).
jQuery Plugins For EU Cookie Law
In order to make our websites compatible with the EU Cookie Law easily and quickly, here are 2 handy jQuery plugins that will help managing cookies + asking user’s permissions for storing them:
Cookiecuttr
This is a beautiful plugin that handles many scenarios you may need to obey the EU Cookie Law.
It allows you to hide any given parts of a website (the parts which generates cookies), and display sensitive modal boxes to users with asking for permission to use cookies.
Also, the plugin can show a "reset button" that can delete all the cookies for that website.
cookiesDirective.js
The plugin works by simply inserting a function to the web pages and prompts the user to accept "cookie usage" for the site.
Cookie creating scripts should be inserted into that function and they’ll be executed automatically if the user accepts it.
cPrompt
The plugin displays a notification to visitors asking "if they let cookies by this site to be enabled".
Depending on the status (the first time user visits the page, cookies are rejected or accepted), the notification bar changes colors.
CookieGuard
CookieGuard is a little more complicated yet feature-rich solution that allows defining cookies one-by-one and defining if they are "essential" or not.
Once it notifies the users about the cookies, they can select which ones to be activated or choose to enable all "essential" ones but not the others.
Learn More About The EU Cookie Law
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/eu-cookie-law-2-jquery-plugins-to-not-break-it/