Chances are you may have heard that the EU is introducing a few changes to legislation around cookies and internet privacy. Not everyone, if anyone, fully understands the new laws coming into effect, but we thought it’d be wise to share what we know and understand so far.

The uncertainty around these laws has caused the UK to delay enforcement for a year to fully comply. There’s a very useful document (PDF) provided by the UK ICO that helps explain what is changing in plain English.

What are the new EU cookie laws?

• EU Directive 2009/136/EC requires prior consent for “storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored” – Articles 5(3) and 6(3).
• Article 29 WP Opinion 171 states that all data read from a device is protected (3.2.1.): “Article 5(3) requires obtaining informed consent to lawfully store information or to gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user.”

When do I need to start worrying about these new laws?

The new EU legislation was supposed to have been passed by all EU countries by 25th May 2011. The only countries to have responded so far are the UK, Denmark, and Estonia.

The UK has given site owners another year to get their sites in order before enforcing the cookie laws.

Enforcement of these laws in unlikely any time soon. However, as a precaution, it is encouraged that all sites review their policies on privacy and understand which cookies they are asking their visitors to store.

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We’ve noticed some odd things happening to some of our stats, and it’s been brought to our attention that some of you, our customers, are experiencing similar issues. The problem pertains to pages with Facebook’s “Like” button or any of their other social plugins.

Quietly duplicating requests.

Under certain circumstances, a page with a Like button can register one extra pageview for every button you have on the page. This is undesirable, because if you run a site with, say, ten like buttons on the homepage, you’ll see eleven pageviews for each and every time someone actually views the page, not one. Obviously this is going to completely throw off all your tracked stats and analytics. Not good.

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What’s this? A new GoSquared Help Sheet? Hell yeah!

We’re pleased to bring you a brand new GoSquared Help Sheet for your Node.JS needs.

What’s Node.JS?

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know, but for those intrigued, Node.JS is an evented I/O framework for the V8 JavaScript engine. It’s ideal for writing scalable network programs such as web servers.

We’ve been working on some exciting things with Node.JS, and we felt it was only fair to share our knowledge in the form of an easy-to-read Help Sheet.

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GoSquared is proud to announce the release of our GoSquared for Magento plugin.

Users of Magento, one of the premiere ecommerce solutions on the web today, can now integrate the GoSquared Tracking Code (GSTC) at the click of a button by simply installing the GoSquared for Magento Plugin.

The plugin is available to download for free over on the official Magento site.

How does GoSquared help Magento users?

For ecommerce website owners, it is critical to know what’s happening on your store right now. With other services such as Google Analytics – you can gain great historical reports about what has happened, but you don’t know what’s happening right now.

On Magento, GoSquared can alert you immediately when you are experiencing a traffic spike, and enables you to find out what product pages are gaining most attention. GoSquared can enable you to find out why your traffic is spiking – has Oprah just tweeted about your new line of shoes? Has TechCrunch just linked to your new lineup of iPhone cases? GoSquared helps you find out, so you can engage with the current audience with the added knowledge of where they’re from and what they’re viewing.

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