Perform a cookie audit advises AOP

Lee Baker from The Association of Online Publishers (AOP) in the UK has advised all its members to perform a cookie audit on all of their websites.

Legislative change, introduced by the revised EU Privacy and Communications Directive, which will be enforced in the UK next year, means that publishers will have to ensure they obtain “consent” from users when collecting, tracking and storing their data.

The boom in publishers collecting, storing and sharing online visitor and customer data for commercial gain has prompted the EU and the UK to institute new data privacy laws requiring consent from online visitors prior to using cookies.

“The AOP advises members to at least have done a cookie audit and know how cookies are being deployed across their sites and how they are harvesting data when the ICO comes knocking next year.” says Lee Baker, AOP Director.

monitr™ is a cookie auditing and monitoring service that performs one time cookie audits and ongoing cookie audits for website operators.

Based on current research provided by AOP members, it has been identified that data, audience profiling and paid-for mobile content will be key for online publishers.

Other key findings:

- Paid content across mobile devices, in particular tablets, are emerging as the primary platforms for paid content. Last year, responses showed that websites would be the main platform.

- Eight in ten publishers have invested in mobile sites, and nine out of ten have mobile-optimised sites

- The top three business opportunities cited for publishers were tablets (94%), adoption of smartphones (92%) and mobile web (81%)

- The top three threats to publishers’ businesses cited were the economy (67%), government and legal restrictions (50%) and the EU privacy directive (48%)

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