Altis Consent

The Altis Consent API provides a website administrator (you) with a centralized and consistent way of obtaining data privacy consent from your website's visitors. Data privacy consent refers to how user data is tracked, collected, or stored on a website.

Web Cookies

A website uses cookies to track user behaviour on the website. Cookies can be thought of as belonging to one of two broad types: first-party cookies, set by the server or code on the domain itself, and third-party cookies served by scripts included from other domains or services (such as Google Analytics). Depending on their function, these cookies can further be categorized into functional or operational cookies, marketing or personalization cookies, or cookies used for statistical data. While functional cookies are necessary for a smooth user experience, other cookies, such as marketing cookies that track user preferences, are not essential for a website's performance. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) governs user data privacy and protection and stipulates that businesses require appropriate consent from website visitors before they are served any such cookies.

We created this framework to help you readily obtain consent from your website users for various cookies that will be served on your website. With the features available in the API, a website's visitor will be able to control the types of data or cookies that can be stored and shared if you choose to offer that level of control.

Why should I use it?

To keep up with the GDPR regulations and your company's privacy and cookie policies. GDPR regulations mandate that businesses need user consent before they can collect or track any visitor data. This tool helps you create a cookie consent banner out of the box. With the banner options, a user can choose to select the cookies (data) that can be collected by the website. The framework lets you manage first party and third party cookies.

How does it work?

Altis Consent is an API that is designed to help you manage when to load scripts that set cookies and other types of data stored locally on a user's computer. It allows you to subscribe to changes in a user's consent and use those events to trigger Google Tag Manager tags, or to lazily load other JavaScript that sets cookies.

What does it do?

Out of the box, the Consent API supports Altis Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Using the controls provided on the Privacy page in the WP admin you can link your website's Privacy Policy and Cookie storage Policy page.

There are options to control whether to grant the user a choice to select the types of cookies they want to consent to, or an option to allow all cookies or only functional cookies. You may also easily add a cookie consent banner message in the admin settings.

In addition, a robust templating system and dozens of filters allow development teams to fully customize the options or the display of the banner, or only customize certain specific elements, based on a site's needs.

What about third-party cookies?

The API allows management of third party cookies if it is configured so. See the JavaScript Reference to see how this can be done.

Can I manage user data tracked through Altis' personalization features?

Altis' personalization features track user data using first-party cookies and are supported by default.

Does the API help categorize the type of cookies?

Altis does not do any automatic categorisation of your cookies. It provides the means for users to control their consent and for you to respond to changes in that consent. Determining which scripts fall into which category needs to be manually determined and can vary by geographical location.

Out of the box, five categories are provided: functional, marketing, statistics, statistics-anonymous and preferences. More categories can be added via a filter.

Note: functional and statistics-anonymous categories are always allowed by default. This can be modified using the altis.consent.always_allow_categories filter.

Configuration

Altis Consent is active by default. However, if your project is already using an alternative consent system and you would like to disable Altis Consent, this can be done in the project's composer.json file:

{
	"extra": {
		"altis": {
			"modules": {
				"privacy": {
					"consent": false
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

Alternatively, you can use the altis.consent.should_display_banner filter or the admin "Display Cookie Consent Banner" setting to disable the banner. Note that neither of these two options will completely disable the Consent API itself, and all associated JavaScript will still load on the page.