30th Apr 2012:  MAGIQ has launched an upgrade to its lifecycle marketing solution, LifecycleMAGIQ, to provide a quick, easy and effective way of dealing with the so called ‘cookie law’ legislation that affects all UK online businesses from the end of May.

The upgrade prompts users to make their choices, records their decisions, and provides a tag-management capability for other products which are affected. The pre-built solution can help them achieve rapid compliance with the legislation without major development costs and without damaging the performance of their online business. In addition, it provides complete support for US proposed “do-not-track” legislation.

No changes to the site are required and no IT skills or web developer support are required.

LifecycleMAGIQ’s ability to dynamically inject personalised content into the visitors’ pages is harnessed by this cookie/privacy management solution to control the injection of tags from other vendor’s systems. This provides a simple mechanism for the site owner to control other cookie setting and data capture technology delivering an integrated compliance solution without any technical complexity.

LifecycleMAGIQ provides a continuously maintained state reflecting the user’s decisions on privacy and cookies. It also sets a cookie in the page reflecting the user’s data collection and privacy choices and this can be used by the site owner in pages/content/scripts to further tune the user experience.

MAGIQ points out that it can be argued that to obey the letter of the law no cookies can be set before consent other than those “essential” to site operation. Most industry experts agree that it makes more sense to actually use a cookie to implement the opt-out, otherwise visitors would need to be re-prompted for their cookie preferences each and every page they visit. Taking this view it becomes clear that using a solution like this to prompt, manage and remember the user's decisions constitutes “essential use” as defined in the legislation, and is therefore permissible and helps to deliver a better customer experience.