GDPR use in urls

#webtrends #webdev #gdpr #privacy

As many of us are painfully aware, on May 25, 2018 GDPR went into effect. The General Data Protection Regulation (yes, I had to look it up) is an EU standard to protect customer data in the EU. For users, it basically means more popups on cookies and tracking. For those in the EU, it also means that some websites from outside the EU are no longer accessible (the sites prefer to keep teh detailed tracking, and simply block EU visitors).

How is GDPR implemented? in the HTTP Archive, many of the urls show if there is a gdpr aspect. Simply looking for website requests with the term ‘gdpr’ shows a small bump in the middle of May, but a large increase in the June 1, 2018 crawl:

Post GDPR enforcement, there has been continued growth of requests using gdpr in the url — nearly doubling again by July 1 as more sites become GDPR compliant.

In the July 15 run of HTTP archive, the number of sites run jumped from 500k to 1.2M, so the y-axis values change drastically, but we still see growth in the number of requests using GDPR or about 100k new requests every 2 weeks:

It appears that more and more sites are adding gdpr compliance to their sites, and the term is appearing in the urls of requests that are gdpr compliant. in 4 months, we’ve seen a jump from near 0 to 2.4% of all urls containing the term GDPR.

Originally published at dougsillars.com on September 14, 2018.

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