The Office of the Vice President for Communications (OVPC), in collaboration with ITS Information Assurance (IA), has released a new consent and preference management solution for U-M websites. The solution, powered by OneTrust, replaces a custom cookie consent and disclosure banner that was implemented in 2018.
Consent management pop-ups have become ubiquitous on websites, especially those attracting visitors from the European Union and California, where privacy regulations require consent before collecting personally identifiable information. These pop-ups assist in the user’s choice to allow or decline the collection of information about their website visits and interactions.
The new U-M consent and preference management solution allows users to opt in or out of analytics and advertising cookies. It is designed to be universally accessible on all umich.edu websites, and has already been deployed on websites that had previously implemented the legacy banner:
- For the majority of U-M websites, the solution is active based on geolocation and the banner is displayed only to users in the EU.
- The ITS Safe Computing website has deployed the OneTrust service for all website visitors, regardless of geolocation.
Christopher Billick, Assistant Vice President for Digital Strategy and Michigan Commons, gives context to the new solution’s implementation: “Our university’s commitment to respecting and protecting privacy has grown and shifted from a compliance focus, to doing what is ethically right in addition to following the laws. We demonstrate our values by giving our audiences agency and respecting their choices.”
The OVPC Digital Strategy team has published instructions for integrating OneTrust consent and preference management on U-M websites. Robert LaRoe, Web Office Team Lead & Web Developer at the School of Social Work, was the first website administrator to implement the new service and shared his experience, “This is awesome. Installation was easy.”
Contact the OVPC Digital Strategy team at umdigital@umich.edu if you have any technical questions about integrating the solution. For general web privacy inquiries, or for help with writing a privacy notice for your website, contact the U-M Privacy Office at privacy@umich.edu.
