Privacy policies and cookie consent are two things that people generally ignore when browsing websites. The latter is even hated upon in countries where it’s strictly enforced (e.g., EU territories due to GDPR) because it becomes a chore to deal with even on the end-user.
I was looking into a website lately and the above items made me think:
“What exactly is necessary if you want to accomplish proper global compliance for a website?”
After doing research for half an hour, I went to dig towards the SEO and Google Analytics rabbit hole of website compliance. And wow, wtf, I wasn’t expecting things like consent management platforms and such.
You’d think that innocent banner asking to accept cookies is just a floating <div> and a bunch of text and buttons but even these are bound to frameworks sometimes if you really want to be obsessive when it comes to GDPR and CCPA compliance.
I like the response I got from Perplexity.
<aside> ✔️
1. Consent Management Platform (CMP)
2. Google Analytics 4 Configuration
3. Legal Documentation
4. Compliance Strategies by Region
| Region | Key Requirements | Consent Approach |
|---|---|---|
| EU | Explicit consent | Opt-in, granular choices |
| California | Right to opt-out | Clear withdrawal mechanism |
| Global | Transparency | Comprehensive information |
5. Technical Implementation
Key Takeaway: Proactive, transparent consent management that respects user privacy across different jurisdictions is crucial for global digital operations.
</aside>
This information doesn’t even include the Philippine-specific parts, but tbh, if you’re covered in GDPR, there’s a high chance that your site also is mostly good at it too — from what I understand, PH rules are more about
Honestly, that’s quite a lot when you’re just coming from “should I add a banner with an accept prompt” and now there’s this rabbit hole of CMPs and configuring GA and having plenty of policies in place.
Thankfully, I found a site that helps checking for compliance that isn’t also a CMP that’s in the business of making you pay them to achieve compliance.
Check website cookies for GDPR compliance and site pages for SSL encryption
On an aside, ugh. Thanks to all this compliance riffraff and privacy theater, now there’s literal businesses that exist to milk these compliance requirements. It sucks, but it makes sense it has to be this way.
Okay, so I've learned that the easiest way to actually get through this is to just look for examples. I can think of two examples in particular. The first one is a government website. So here in the Philippines, you have something called the Official Gazette.
And it turns out that the Official Gazette is done well when you pass it through 2GDPR and they passed all of the checks. Other corporate companies locally even have issues when it comes to GDPR compliance.
A surprising result, because normally PH sites only care about PH compliance.
The second example I had in mind was actually IKEA…!