A conditional GDPR Cookie Consent form that appears for EU and UK visitors only

Design help Custom code
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We’re using the Finsweet GDPR compliant cookie consent form for our site however we only want it to appear for UK and EU visitors not other regions. Does anyone know if this is possible or reasonably achievable and the best way to go about it? Thanking you in advance for any insights you can share!

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Finsweet now has two versions of the cookie component, the free one, and the new paid one which is part of their Components set.

I’d first check the docs on both to see if this capability is built in.

If not, the way I’d personally approach it is;

  • Setup a reverse proxy
  • Tag the cookie consent elements and scripts with a custom attribute like eu-only
  • Have the reverse-proxy check the user’s location. If it’s not in an EU country, then delete those all elements tagged with eu-only before they’re delivered to the browser

This is straightforward to build for someone who is familiar with Cloudflare reverse proxy setups and workers.

Four complications I can think of;

One technical, which can be overcome;

  • Browser caching. If the user travels, e.g. Italy ( EU ) today, Switzerland ( non-EU ) tomorrow, their browser might cache an invalid version. I’d have the reverse proxy give a browser cache TTL of 0 to avoid weirdness.

Three political-
Importantly, I am not a lawyer, this is only my personal take-

  • In my example even though Switzerland is not part of the EU, it does have similar data privacy laws. Finland is similar - not-EU, but even more aligned with EU cookie-consent requirements.
  • EU laws protect EU citizens, which doesn’t technically stop at the borders. An EU citizen in Antarctica is still technically covered by GDPR.
  • If you are outside the EU, and are not targeting EU citizens, then your site might be exempt from GDPR cookie consent regs. However, the GDPR is not specific on what “targeting” EU citizens means. If your site accepts payments in euros, or offers shipping to EU countries, or is localized to an EU language, that’s probably “targeting.”
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Hi Michael

I really appreciate your taking the time to respond to my post with a potential solution and the things we need to think about around potential complications.

We’ll check the Finsweet documentation and we also have someone here who would be familiar with Cloudflare reverse proxy setups so we’ll probably try the approach you suggested bearing in mind the other things we need to think about.

Again thanks for your help!