Given that all current twitter buttons become illegal in the EU on May 26th, how about twitter makes a standardised cookie-free button?

SynchroM · 2012-05-22T11:59:59.000Z

Legislation that comes into force on May 26th will make all non-essential cookies (and that definitely includes those used by Twitter buttons) require explicit end-user opt-in before they can be used. Contravention carries a fine of up to £500,000. This affects millions of sites, and yet Twitter offers no straightforward way of creating cookie-free versions of their buttons. There are a few mentions of this problem on here, but nothing that’s going to be easy for anyone to implement quickly and easily. Given that most buttons are created using twitter’s button generator, it only seems reasonable to ask twitter to add a cookie-free option when building them.

Twitter really needs to make some kind of statement about this; while it’s not in their interest to do so (they want the data given to them via cookies), it’s not them that will be liable for the fines.

They’re not alone of course: Facebook and Google+ have the same problem.

episod · 2012-05-24T14:29:05.000Z

Hi Marcus,

This [support:20169941, title=“help desk article”] covers the Europe status of this integration:


"If you're in Europe, the feature is not currently available to you, and your page visits are not collected to tailor your experience."

You can also pass the explicit dnt=true parameter to your Tweet & Follow Buttons on your site to further cordon off the features.

SynchroM · 2012-05-24T15:49:00.000Z

I’m not talking about tailoring. Just loading a twitter button is enough to provoke cookie setting. Loading a page containing a standard ‘follow’ button (as created with the button generator) with Do Not Track enabled in the browser, and dnt=1 added to the widget URL still causes the setting of 3 cookies.

It’s not just widgets either - just visiting http://twitter.com having deleted all twitter cookies and with with ‘Do Not Track’ enabled sets 15 cookies without asking permission.

If twitter is going to remain legal in Europe, all this has got to change.

As a workaround I’ve had to replace my twitter buttons with plain image links.

IMHO it’s a really dumb law, but it IS the law…

niall · 2016-02-06T23:01:40.147Z