YJL

I didn’t receive any emails, but I was aware of Google’s new EU user consent policy via AdSense, and I did know about this EU cookie thing years ago when it stirred a storm in Europe.

Well, now it’s become a global catastrophe. To be honest, I’d just left a note that scheduled myself to remove AdSense — the only one still uses cookies on this blog — from this blog on 2015-09-29. I read somewhere Google sent email mentioning this date, September 30, 2015. I am prepared to remove it if there is no easy way to handle this.

Believe me, I could code, but I don’t want to, especially not for a law that I disagree. The goal of protection is good, but the means are flawed and hitting the wrong targets. That doesn’t mean I am going to break it even I’ve not even ever been to Europe, I’d remove ads if it comes to that.

As I went to Blogger dashboard, this greeted me:

Thanks you, Blogger!

If you use .blogspot.com, that is no custom domain, then you can just change .com to any country’s ccTLD in EU to test and make sure the notice is served properly, which reads:

This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalise ads and to analyse traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. [Learn More] [Got it]

This blog has custom domain and no notices is served outside EU countries, so I’d to find a web proxy in EU, but it does show:

I am sure every visitor to my blog has no chance to miss that notice, freaking huge.

From what I could tell, it inserts the following code in the end of HTML:

<!-- 'It is your responsibility to notify your visitors about cookies used on your blog. See http://www.blogger.com/go/cookiechoices for more details.' -->
<script src="/js/cookiechoices.js" defer></script>
<script>
  document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(event) {
    window.cookieChoices && cookieChoices.showCookieConsentBar && cookieChoices.showCookieConsentBar(
        (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.msg) || 'This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalise ads and to analyse traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies.',
        (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.close) || 'Got it',
        (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.learn) || 'Learn More',
        (window.cookieOptions && cookieOptions.link) || 'https://www.blogger.com/go/blogspot-cookies');
  });
</script>

The “to analyse traffic” is inaccurate on this blog, I don’t use Google Analytics anymore.

Since there are many languages used in EU and Blogger does provide the specific language associated to the ccTLD — I tried .fr first and got absolutely no idea what it was saying.

I was hoping there is an input box for a customized message, guess this is Blogger would do so far, maybe we will have in near future. If a website only serves in English, does it have to provide the languages that visitors speak?

From the look of the code about, you can actually add the following code to <head/> to change the message. Of course, you might also need to change close, learn, or link for your own detail on this cookie thing for visitors to learn about.

<script>
  cookieOptions = {
    'msg': 'custom message'
  }
</script>

The link in dashboard notice does mention how to change or remove the notice.

For me, I am just using these default settings, it covers the ads part and that’s enough, nothing needs to be done from my end, hooray!