They need some sort of analytics if they want to know how the site is used, but as a Brit who uses that site I'd really rather they didn't use GA, it's not appropriate, in my opinion for a government service.
Can you point me toward a more moral path that won't make it painful for SEO contractors to work with our startup?
If there's something better, or more informative than Google Analytics, I would obviously love to choose that!
Umami is a great self-hosted alternative, which you can load under a subdomain to avoid it being blocked by adblockers. Most of the SaaS products end up on uBlock or other adblocker lists, even when they respect privacy, so this has been my go to option.
UserTrack is another great option we use and it continues to add great features. It's more than worth the commercial license fee. I had a conversation with Cristian by email this weekend, for example, about adding a feature. By this morning he had put together an example in their docs on how to add the feature to your site.
There are several alternatives, you'll tend to find a lot of them advertised in the comments section here for any anti-Google Analytics post.
If you have google.com blocked, instead of asking you to unblock it you just get told "we can't confirm the details you entered are genuine".
Page in question: https://test-for-coronavirus.service.gov.uk/register-home-te...
Even the feedback form linked from there is "Protected by reCAPTCHA". Ridiculous.
And even not for that, analytics is a useful tool to figure out how people use the website.
In the UK, cookies used for only that purpose don't require consent. In their cookie policy, you can see they don't ask for permission to set such cookies - they rely on a different legal basis: https://www.blog.gov.uk/cookies/
(But they could self host)
GA is already approved and installable via a meta tag, so besides the warm feeling of fighting the giant, there is not too much upside and lots of questions to answer.
Upper stakeholders should connect the ideas : "Google data monopoly" and "other option for analytics should be available".
/rant's-off
But as others have said, you don't need a cookie notice of all you're using is necessary cookies.
Plus in the UK the ICO is underfunded, has a low enforcement record and is now sending menacing, misleading, letters demanding £40 from every UK business even though 90% of them don't actually need to pay the fee.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-fee/
I agree it’s a complete joke, they demand you pay, then you pay £40 annually to basically click yes on 3 questions saying you are holding consumers personal information correctly with zero verification.
"It should take about 15 minutes to complete this form."
Really? 15m to make a 40-quid payment? Please fix that (or better, don't charge a fee unless you're providing a service).
I just hope that at some point someone will calculate amount of time lost by clicking on these banners.
edit: Don't get me wrong idea behind is important, but practical implementation is just terrible. Either enforce it, exercise it or upgrade law to forbid any hint of user tracking, in the way it is implemented right now is just wasting people time and nerves.
This is illegal. Unfortunately, enforcement of the GDPR is laughable and everyone knows it, so the practice continues.
An exception: Disqus got in legal trouble in Norway for this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060609
In my mind, thats more important than the potential data leak of someone knowing that someone running Chrome 95 for Windows took 8.6 seconds to click from "Tax info" to "Self Employed Tax Info".
They don't need cookies. They're not running ads (one hopes). There's no "conversion". It's just info. If they just need traffic info, they can get that from their server logs. They don't need Google Analytics. Nor should they be giving information to Google.