Google Blogger and EU Cookie Laws

This is very kind of Google...providing you with an automatically generated privacy notice to European customers as detailed on the Blogger settings page:

This to me highlights a few problems with privacy laws and compliance:

• Firstly, you have to understand EU privacy laws
• You have to understand how to write such a notice
• You have to understand what systems such as Google Analytics etc actually collect and process.
• You might have to provide an opt-out mechanism such as Google's Analytics Opt-Out.

For 99.999% of bloggers (+/- a few %age points), I strongly doubt that any of this is understood or even known about at all.

So while Google might come in for some criticism for its dominance in the information gathering domain, they at least try to make things easier for their customers.

Then there's the EU Cookie Consent Kit which guides you through at least one part of the consent notice maze.

As an exercise, write a simple website...now work out what privacy notice you should display. Just to make it interesting, you are not allowed to have any contact with a privacy lawyer nor anyone who has a detailed knowledge about such things.

This quote by Einstein (often misattributed to Feynmann) sums up privacy laws and the average person writing a blog:

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother

Our privacy laws have become so complicated and often so misaligned with technology that they can not be easily understood by the average Internet user.