Is there a setting on Google Adsense to suppress use of cookies for users who have not yet given consent

14
votes

Update: I have split my original question into two to let each one be more cohesive.

According to EU Article 5(3) of the E-Privacy Directive (a.k.a 'The Cookie Laws'), web sites that target EU users have to gain opt-in consent from users before they set a cookie.

See ICO Guidence

I am trying to square this with Google Adsense on my web site.

I would imagine that Google Adsense can serve ads without having to set cookies.

However, I cannot find any info on this (on the Google sites/settings panels) about how to relay information about the 'state of consent' back to Google during a page request. So, my only option seems to be that I should not embed Google tag code at all if the user has not explicitly given consent. Which seems a bit drastic.

Letting my serverside script set a 'hasConsentedToCookies=FALSE' flag in the JavaScript tags would allow me to instruct Google's services to run in a gracefully degraded fashion.

Is there a setting on Google Adsense to suppress use of cookies for users that have not yet given consent?

If so, where can I find info on this?

1
cookiesadsense
The most stupid bit of law to come out of the EU. On page 13 "The person setting the cookie is therefore primarily responsible for compliance with the requirements of the law." You could argue that you are not the person setting the cookie, its google doing that. Hence its their problem. – Salix alba

1 Answers

1
votes

No, there isn't a setting in Google AdSense. Google actually just released a note about changes to the consent policy in July 2015 pointing you to a Google site called Cookie Choices, which has information about EU consent as well as links to third party solutions for managing cookie consent functionality on your sites.

So the short answer is that you need to explore the third party tools and choose the one that best addresses your particular case.