When GDPR came into force, everyone went a bit over-the-top. The final week before the law came in was a barrage of terrible emails.
The irony was that if a company already had your permission to email you, they didn’t need to ask you again. And if they didn’t have permission to email you, they shouldn’t be emailing you. In theory you shouldn’t have got a single email. The reality was a chaotic mess of confusion.
Disappointingly things haven’t got much better since. Websites still ask users at the front door if they want to be tracked, with no incentive. If a shop did this on a high street, people would probably just turn away.
You didn’t need to get those emails then, and you don’t need to ask people for permission to use cookies when they arrive now.
Sure you might want to track a user’s usage of your site from the start, but the answer is pretty simple: don’t use a solution that has tracking cookies, and then you don’t need to ask.
As far the marketing side, I understand why you’d want to use tracking cookies. It does work to remind people of what they were looking at, it cannot be denied. But almost forcing people into it is a tad annoying. But of all the places on the web, I finally found one that has come close to doing it a really nice way.
When you’ve not enabled cookies, but you get to the bottom of a product page on the Lego website, you’re given the information required to ask you to turn on cookies for this feature. And you’re even given a bit of an incentive to do so. Plus some fun Lego cookies!
This is the kind of usage we were suppose to see, and I’d love to see a lot more of it in the future instead of those terrible take-over modals when you land on a new site.