Cookie Law Implementation Change

Owned by Jay El-Kadhi
Jul 19, 2022
2 min read

Dear Editor,

Recently, the Medical Sciences Division has asked us to carry out the implementation of the updated cookie banner (that has been developed as part of the Haiku upgrade), on the current Haiku infrastructure as soon as possible.

 

We have rapidly migrated and adapted the new cookie banner functionality that we developed during the Haiku upgrade into the current version of the Haiku system. We have completed our testing on this, and we will deploy the update to all live Haiku sites on Tuesday, 19th of July. We will carry out the update outside of business hours, in the evening, after 18:00 BST.

 

The update will change how the cookie banner functions. Users will now have to opt-in to all non-essential cookies. The non-essential cookies that are used on Haiku sites are Google Analytics. Therefore, if you use Google Analytics on your haiku site, your analytics data will be impacted. 

 

The impact of this change is that you will likely see a significant drop in the data in your Google Analytics. This is because website users will either take no action on the cookie banner and therefore not opt-in, or users will reject the non-essential cookies again, not opting in. Research shows that significant numbers of users do not choose to opt-in to non-essential cookies, particularly ones related to user tracking. 

 

We are acutely aware that many of you rely on the information from your Google Analytics to see trends and help manage and guide the content on your sites. With this in mind, we will be able to provide you with some level of analytics that is anonymous directly from the server information. We are in the process of defining the information that we will be able to supply you with. We will update you by the end of this week with what information you can request so that you can keep receiving information on your Haiku site usage. 

 

We are required by law to make these changes, and we appreciate your understanding of the rapid rollout of this. For more information about cookies and how they are used in Haiku, please visit our knowledge base article where we have made relevant updates:

https://fry-it.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/HKB/pages/1228734472

 

If you have any questions regarding this, please contact the Oxford Medical Sciences Division web services team.

 

Kind regards,

The Haiku Team