Cookie Law and Your Hair and Beauty Website

written by: Stephen Garside published: 01 June 2012

If you own a website for your hair and beauty business, and it uses cookies, from the 26th May 2012 you will need to gain consent from your visitors before placing cookies on their PC / mobile device.

Cookies are small text files used to store information on your visitors machines to help personalise website content, track visitor numbers (e.g. Google Analytics), interact with social media sites like Facebook etc.

The law is still a little hazy about how you should gain your visitors consent, and two approaches have materialised. The first is to gain consent before placing cookies with for example a tick box. The second is 'implied consent' and involves warning the user you are automatically placing cookies on their machine, giving them the option to switch them off.

At Hairdressers and Salons we have opted for the latter approach which is also being used by sites such as www.bbc.co.uk and www.bt.com to name but a few.

It is highly unlikely that website owners will be prosecuted for not implementing an approach to cookies, but that is not definate - so it may be a good time to get your house in order!