All about Foleon and GDPR

Since its very founding, Foleon has focussed on protecting its customers’ data and keeping up with the latest standards and industry best practices.

In this article, we discuss the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws and how they relate to Foleon.

What is GDPR?

On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. The GDPR is a set of laws aimed at enhancing the protection of EU citizens’ personal data and increasing the obligations of organizations to deal with that data in transparent and secure ways.

More information about the GDPR can be found here, on the official EU website. Before diving into what this means for the Foleon product, let’s start with some definitions.

• GDPR - in full the General Data Protection Regulation. This is the EU rule that aims to protect the Data Privacy of EU citizens.

• Consent - Permission to activate a certain feature.
  - Opt-in: A user explicitly has to take action to activate a certain feature.
  - Opt-out: A user has the ability to block permission and disable a feature.

• CMP - a Consent Management Platform is a software platform that lets you customize your consent message and options, e.g. double opt-in and default values.

• Functional Cookies - These are needed to have the web page properly function. No consent is required, but it is mandatory to ‘Inform’.

• Analytical Cookies - These are focused on the performance of the web page. The data that is gathered has to be anonymized. Consent is required and the ability to opt-out is mandatory.

• Marketing Cookies - These cookies track the activity of an individually identifiable user/visitor (eg MAP Tracking code). Consent through Opt-in is required to activate this.

• 1st Party Cookies: Cookies are available to the domain that created them. (eg a Foleon cookie on www.foleon.com)

• 3rd Party Cookies: A third-party cookie is accessible by the website that loads the third-party server’s code. (eg a Google Analytics cookie on www.foleon.com)

The Foleon product

Every Foleon Doc has cookies, and according to the GDPR regulation, you need to inform your readers about these cookies. Additionally, when using Marketing Cookies customers are obligated to have an Opt-in consent.

To be clear, No marketing cookies should be executed until consent is given, which is how the Foleon-built consent manager is exactly designed. Since other types of cookies only require an ‘Inform’ and option to Opt-out these are enabled by default.

One way to inform and ask consent from your readers would be with our built-in cookie consent pop-up. This built-in feature is fully GDPR compliant, and users are able to configure the following settings:

• Add descriptive text

• Link to a privacy policy

• Allow your audience to change their cookie preferences

• Allow your audience to update consent at any time

Cookies in Foleon — an overview

Below you can find a list of all cookies that can be placed in Foleon Docs.

There are different types of cookies, as you can see in the category column of the table below. Functional cookies are necessary to ensure your content works as expected — meaning they can't be disabled. When it comes to analytical or targeting cookies, the cookies actually being placed depends on your cookie consent setup, and which cookies your visitor decides to decline.

To learn how to allow your audience to change their cookie preferences and what happens when they decline cookies, read our article All about cookie consent. 

Keep in mind that video platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo will also drop cookies.

Consent Management Platforms

The Foleon consent pop-up complies with all GDPR requirements. However, since these options are not the main focus of our product, there are limitations to how far you can customize this feature.

If you have the need to customize your cookie consent options, we recommend purchasing a dedicated CMP that you implement into Foleon. Some customization examples would be:

• Double Opt-in requirements

• Customized consent text

• Branding requirements for the consent pop-up

Most cookie banner platforms integrate with Google Tag Manager (GTM) and they often provide detailed instructions on how to implement it. Read all about it in our article Consent Manager Platforms and Foleon. You can also check out this article from CookieBot to check out how they help you with the integration.

Additionally, using the GTM script field in the product allows Foleon to be fully compatible and have the platforms connect seamlessly. The advantage of using a script manager such as GTM is that you can easily control which script to fire and when to fire it.