Date: 28 June 2011
The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 came into force in the UK on 26 May 2011. Although the regulations do allow the use of cookies that are essential to the operation of the website without user consent, the Information Commissioner Office’s (ICO) guidelines on the regulations make it quite clear that the use of cookies for website analytics require positive consent by the user.

John Harrison, CEO of Maxsi explained "Most free website analytics systems use cookies. Although the regulations do allow the use of cookies that are essential to the operation of the website without user consent, the Information Commissioner Office’s (ICO) guidelines on the regulations make it quite clear that the use of cookies for website analytics require positive consent by the user. The ICO can levy penalties of up to £500,000 for infringements"

"In order to be compliant with their own guidelines the ICO spent £3,942.50 installing an opt-in banner on their own website for visitors to give consent to their website analytics system using cookies."

"We will gloss over the fact that their free website analytics system is now looking quite expensive. An FOI request to the ICO established just how much an impact to the accuracy of cookie-based website analytics system is caused by adding visitor consent.

In the two weeks before the addition of the opt-in, their website analytics system was registering an average of just over 8,000 absolute unique visitors per day. In the fortnight after adding the opt-in their systems reported an average of under 750 absolute unique visitors per day. In other words, a drop of over 90%."
"Spending money trying to make a free website analytics system compliant may turn out to be an expensive mistake. A lot of website owners use these systems but unfortunately they may end up costing them anything but free."

"Website analytics is essential to effective website management so having none is not a sensible solution. Giving visitors an opt-in to a cookie based website analytics system will just completely compromise any results from it and make it about as useful as a chocolate fireguard and an expensive one at that."

"Fortunately, we can offer website owners IP Address and User Agent based systems within our eVisit Analyst range. As they don't use cookies they do not need opt-ins from users. The process of adding these systems to a website is the same as cookie-based systems. Our eVisit Analyst range of IP Address and User Agent systems is accepted by the Audit Bureau of Circulation for website audit."