Customizing GDPR cookies notification bar that pops up on your blog

How to properly edit or completely remove the GDPR cookies notification bar that pops up on your Blogger blog

Blogger Cookies Notification Bar is a popup that will show up if our blog is being accessed inside the European Country Region.

This bar comes up as a follow-up to GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation and is a data protection law in the EU that came into force from May 2018.

The aim of the GDPR is to give citizens of the EU control over their personal data and change the approach of organizations across the world towards data privacy. The GDPR provides much stronger rules than existing laws and is much more restrictive than the “EU cookie law.”

For instance, users must confirm that their data can be collected, there must be a clear privacy policy showing what data is going to be stored, how it is going to be used, and provide the user with the right to withdraw consent to the use of personal data (consequently deleting the data) if required.

Blogger automatically added the EU Cookie Notification on our blogs to help meet these regulations. The notice explains how Blogger Cookies, as well as the use of Google Analytics and Adwords Cookies. This will only be shown to visitors within the EU and will disappear when the user clicks “Got it”.

Since the notification only shows up inside the EU citizen, we can't see that bar if we live outside the EU region. However, there is a trick to see the notice. Go to our blog address and change the country code by adding ?gl=[countrycode] to the end of the URL. For example, https://example.blogspot.com?gl=nl.

If we have added other blog features that set cookies, such as including third-party analytics services, plugins, etc., we’ll need to provide additional or different notices. It is our responsibility to tell what our blog cookie use is and what else would be appropriate. If we choose to use a different notice, be sure it still complies with Google’s EU user policy.

We can remove that Cookies Notification Bar if we want to, but it's our responsibility as content creators to avoid penalties of GDPR by telling our visitors about cookies.

To customize the text shown in the Blogspot cookies notification, follow these steps:

1. Go to Template > Edit HTML and find </head>.
2. Above </head>, place the following script:

bash
<script type="text/javascript">
  cookieOptions = {
    msg: "This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalize ads and to analyze traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies.",
    link: "https://www.blogger.com/go/blogspot-cookies",
    close: "Okay!",
    learn: "Learn More"
  };
</script>

3. Edit the text value in between quotes of each msg, link, close, and learn, then save your template.

To completely remove the Blogspot Cookies Notification, simply replace the script code above with the following code:

php
<script type="text/javascript">
  cookieChoices = {};
</script>

To change the Cookies Notification Bar to the bottom, follow these steps:

1. Add the following CSS code above ]]></b:skin> in Template > Edit HTML:

css
.cookie-choices-info {
  position: fixed;
  top: auto !important;
  bottom: 0px !important;
}

We hope this guide helps you customize the Blogspot cookies notification according to your preference while keeping it compliant with GDPR.

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