Yes, Europeople, We Have Cookies

A notice from Blogger popped up on my dashboard this week, and I thought I'd share the wealth just in case some of you have inactive blogs on Blogger:

"European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent.

As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies.

You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities."

Okay, so here's the deal: Blogger wants to help out with this requirement, so they have attempted to add a notice to everyone's blog. Your end is to make sure it actually shows up on your blog. Easy way to do that: type your blog URL but change it to a Euro URL (i.e. mine over in the UK is http://pbackwriter.blogspot.co.uk -- and yours probably has the same end extension.) When your blog comes up it should look like this:



If you don't see that notice bar at the top of your blog (or anywhere else) then you have to put up a notice and consent button, and more information on that can be found in the middle of the help page here.

To my knowledge I haven't installed any cookies on PBW (unless it was inadvertant) and since I have no idea how to I'm not planning to any time in the future. That said, Blogger does use some sort of cookie thing on here to create that dashboard junk data that I never asked for and generally ignore that dates back to when Google ate Blogger and messed with the whole set up. Anyway, since this is like that FTC notice thing I thought I'd pass along the headsup.