‘Cookies’ is a commonly used term in internet-lingo that is often not understood by users. Cookies are essentially a tool that can be used to collect numerous amounts of data about visitors to your website. Some website owners aren’t aware that their site uses cookies, but the majority of websites that collect data use cookies. To determine this, you can choose to manually check through your website and third parties to see if there any cookies or collecting of data. Likewise, you could then choose to use a private site to go through and analyse your website to see if there are any cookies and what types there are. Ultimately, if a website uses cookies, then it will usually need a privacy policy.
What are cookies?
Cookies are simply data files that a website collects. These data files are activated and stored on your computer once you visit a website. The cookie can then continue to monitor what you do on other websites. This is the backbone of targeted advertising. The other function of a cookie is to help users in their engagement with the website. For example, an abandoned online shopping cart or webpage recovery for consumers.
Signs that a website uses cookies
Hosting site
The first place to check is your hosting site. This depends upon whether you built the website yourself from scratch, paid someone else to do it, or use a popular commercial website hosting service. A host is separate from a domain. The hosting service in their settings or terms may state that they will collect data from your users interaction on the website. This may be to improve their hosting services. The other scenario would be if you personally activated tools like Google Analytics which would then collect and store consumer data.
Payment
A staple of ecommerce is the payment option. There are a variety of merchant services. As a result you should check how they store credit card details, email addresses and other personal information. In this case, cookies may not even be the vessel or mode of collection. Consumers manually entering in these details still involves personal information which a third party is collecting.
Other
There are other random cookies like geolocation, what actions they do on the website, history and preferences. They serve different functions like passwords, shopping carts, user setting, shipping and location. The way to check for all of these is to engage private services which scan your website for cookies. Realistically, your website probably makes use of cookies already. If that is the case you should mention in a privacy policy that you use cookies.
Legal Obligations
Australia
A website that uses cookies has two legal obligations. The first is to abide by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) in Australia. Furthermore, the regulation of personal information is summarised under privacy principle number 5. Thus, the key idea is that you need to notify users that you are collecting personal information. Two quick ways to do this is by creating a privacy policy and displaying a banner at the bottom of the page. This banner states something along the idea of by using this page you agree to our use of cookies.
International
The other obligation is the GDPR. The EU brought in new legislation which relate to the collection of data of individuals in the EU. This sounds like it may not be relevant to you as you might only trade in Australia. However, if an EU individual visited your website, immediately your website would begin to gather personal information about them due to cookies. Therefore, you would need a GDPR privacy policy if the website uses cookies.
Need more help? Contact a LawPath consultant on 1800 529 728 to learn more about customising legal documents and obtaining a fixed-fee quote from Australia’s largest legal marketplace.
