When you create an interactive experience on Dot.vu, you must consider if you wish to recognize visitors across visits (sessions). You might also want or be required to obtain the user’s consent to being recognized in those future visits. This involves making your users aware of what Cookies are, and which Cookies are being used.
In this article we cover what you need to know about Cookies and how to configure your project to match your needs, while remaining compliant with the data privacy legislation or guidelines applicable between you and your audience.
What Are Cookies?
A cookie is a small text file, that is sent to your computer when you visit a website. When you visit the site again, the cookie allows that site to recognize your browser. Cookies may store user preferences and other information.
Cookies provide a convenience feature to save you time or to tell the Web server that you have returned to a specific page.
The Cookie Bar
Dot.vu interactive experiences set one essential cookie, and may set a tracking cookie and a functionality cookie.
The essential cookie is, as the name suggests, required. But you can use the Cookie bar to control if and when your interactive experience will set a tracking cookie.
You can find your Cookie bar settings on each of your interactive experiences on Dot.vu, in the Editor, under Page Settings, and then on the Privacy tab.
The Cookie bar supports the following four modes:
Disabled (no tracking)
With this mode selected, your interactive experience will only set essential session cookies, and no tracking will be done. This means that every new session is a new visitor, without any previous record or data associated.
Disabled (tracking)
In this mode, your interactive experience automatically sets a cookie, if not already set, to recognize the visitor in future visits to any experience of the same Dot.vu account.
This is useful for example if you are embedding an interactive experience in a context where the user has already given consent to your Cookie Policy or Privacy Policy.
Basic
Enables a simple cookie bar that displays a cookie consent message, that you must configure and which should include a link to your own Privacy Policy, and presents the option to Decline or Accept.
- If a user Declines: no tracking cookie is set
- If a user Accepts: a tracking cookie is set and the visitor will be recognized in future visits to any experience of that Dot.vu account
When the visitor chooses, the interactive experience sets a functionality cookie to memorize the users choice of Accepting or Declining.
Combined with other consents
This enables the same as the Basic cookie bar above, but also presents other custom defined consents for GDPR compliance. You can define your accounts consents on your Dashboard under Audience, and then Privacy.
Privacy Settings bar and Managing Consent
Your users can always use their browser settings to see, manage and clear the cookies your Dot.vu interactive experiences set, but that may be cumbersome and is certainly not transparent.
It is recommended, or even required, depending where you are in the world (e.g. GDPR in the EU), that if you obtain consent from your users, they should have an easy and clear access to means of revoking that consent.
So when you create an interactive experience on Dot.vu, you can enable a Privacy settings bar where your users can go to to manage given consents.
There are two ways to provide access to the Privacy Settings bar:
- Always visible: to enable Privacy Settings bar on an interactive experience on Dot.vu so that is always be accessible at the end (bottom) of that experience, go to your Page Settings in the editor, click the Privacy tab, and check the Enable privacy settings bar checkbox.
- Custom design access, via an action: to control the position and access to the Privacy settings bar, you can use the Open privacy settings action. Just search for the term “privacy” when adding an action where suitable, such as on a button’s click trigger.
List of Cookies
Here’s a list of all cookies Dot.vu either sets (essential) or may set (you decide).
- dot_session – essential
- dot_v_* or dot_c_* – non-essential, tracking
- COOKIE_CONSENT_* – functional
Check below to find out what cookies your interactive experience will set. It will vary depending on your Privacy configuration.
Once you know what cookies your interactive experience will set, you can then add the information above to your own Cookie Policy or Privacy Policy to be transparent in relation to what cookies are set by the Dot.vu interactive experience on your behalf.
Essential Cookies
A Dot.vu interactive experience always sets one essential cookie:
- dot_session – used to identify a specific user session. This cookie serves only to recognize a user during one browser session, so that multiple data submissions by the same user within the same session are related to each other. When the visitor closes their browser, this cookie is deleted.
Info: a browser session starts when the user visits one of your Dot.vu experiences, and ends when the user closes the browser.
Tracking Cookies
A Dot.vu interactive experience will set a tracking cookie when a visitor arrives, if not already set, in any of the following cookie bar configurations:
- Cookie bar set to Disabled (tracking)
- Basic cookie bar, and the visitor gives consent
- Cookie bar combined with consents, and the visitor gives consent
The tracking cookie that allows us to recognize the visitor is:
- dot_v_* or dot_c_* – used to recognize a visitor in future visits to any interactive experience belonging to the same Dot.vu client account
Functionality Cookies
A Dot.vu experience does not set any functionality cookies by default.
However, when a visitor chooses to accept or decline the tracking cookie, the interactive experience will set the following functionality cookie:
COOKIE_CONSENT_* – indicates weather the user has consented or not with setting a tracking cookie.
This way, when a visitor returns to one of your interactive experiences, they will not be prompted again with the Cookie bar.
Third Party Cookies
External content included in a Dot.vu interactive experience, over which Dot.vu has no control, may set third party cookies. Examples of such external content include, but not exclusively:
- External video players, such as YouTube or Vimeo
- Social networking components, such as Facebook share and like buttons
- Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics
So if your interactive experience is using external content, you must find and list what cookies that content sets, if any, in the Privacy Policy linked to your interactive experience or website.
Embedding
When you embed Dot.vu interactive experiences on your website, you should present what cookies will be set in the respective Cookie Policy or Privacy Policy of your website.
You may want to also set controls so that you only load the experience once the user has consented on your side to your Privacy Policy, and there you won’t need to enable a cookie bar for a more seamless experience.
Help!
When in doubt, or if you have any further questions or concerns, you can always check with our support via the LiveChat function on the bottom right corner of the Editor or on our website.