
Keep your cookies under control
What is SiteSCAN?
It’s a free tool designed to help the public sector to comply with current regulations on the use of tracking cookies by their websites. New, stricter regulations on ‘cookie consent’ come into force regularly and very few websites are dealing adequately with the implications.
SiteSCAN provides you with a report on the ‘non-essential’ cookies dropped onto a visitor’s web browser before consent is given. If your website serves any of these non-essential cookies, you are breaking data privacy regulations. There is more information about current regulations and how to understand your report below.
We have developed a consent management platform – CAN Accord – especially for public sector organisations that ensures no non-essential cookies are dropped until consent is given. It is available FREE to all councils. Contact us for details.
Download your FREE report
Choose the name of your council from the dropdown list below and download a PDF report on the homepage. We can also send you reports on other pages on your council website or for other dates free of charge by email (click on the ‘Order a report’ button under ‘What will the report tell me?’ below).
Aberdeen City
Aberdeenshire
Adur & Worthing
Amber Valley
Anglesey
Angus
Antrim and Newtownabbey
Ards and North Down
Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon
Arun
Ashfield
Ashford
Aylesbury Vale
Babergh
Barking and Dagenham
Barnet
Barrow-in-Furness
Basildon
Basingstoke and Deane
Bassetlaw
Bath and North East Somerset
Bedford
Belfast
Bexley
Birmingham
Blaby
Blackburn with Darwen
Blackpool
Bolsover
Bolton
Boston
Bournemouth
Bracknell Forest
Bradford
Braintree
Breckland
Brent
Brentwood
Bridgend
Brighton and Hove
Bristol, City of
Broadland
Bromley
Broxbourne
Broxtowe
Buckinghamshire
Burnley
Bury
Caerphilly
Calderdale
Cambridge
Cambridgeshire
Camden
Cannock Chase
Canterbury
Cardiff
Carlisle
Carmarthenshire
Castle Point
Causeway Coast and Glens
Central Bedfordshire
Ceredigion
Charnwood
Cheltenham
Chelmsford
Cherwell
Cheshire East
Cheshire West and Chester
Chesterfield
Chichester
Chiltern
Chorley
Christchurch
City of London
Clackmannanshire
Colchester
Conwy
Copeland
Corby
Cornwall
Cotswold
County Durham
Coventry
Craven
Crawley
Cumbria
Dacorum
Darlington
Dartford
Daventry
Denbighshire
Derby
Derbyshire
Derry City and Strabane
Devon
Doncaster
Dorset (includes districts)
Dover
Dudley
Dumfries and Galloway
Dundee City
Durham
East Ayrshire
East Cambridgeshire
East Devon
East Dunbartonshire
East Hertfordshire
East Lindsey
East Lothian
East Northamptonshire
East Renfrewshire
East Riding of Yorkshire
East Staffordshire
East Suffolk
East Sussex
Eastbourne
Eastleigh
Eden
Edinburgh, City of
Eilean Siar
Elmbridge
Epping Forest
Epsom and Ewell
Erewash
Essex
Exeter
Falkirk
Fareham
Fenland
Fermanagh and Omagh
Fife
Flintshire
Folkestone & Hythe
Forest of Dean
Fylde
Gateshead
Gedling
Glasgow City
Gloucester
Gloucestershire
Gosport
Gravesham
Great Yarmouth
Greenwich
Guildford
Gwynedd
Hackney
Hambleton
Hammersmith and Fulham
Hampshire
Harborough
Harlow
Harrogate
Hart
Hartlepool
Hastings
Havering
Herefordshire, County of
Hertfordshire
Hertsmere
High Peak
Highland
Hillingdon
Hinckley and Bosworth
Horsham
Hounslow
Hull
Huntingdonshire
Hyndburn
Inverclyde
Ipswich
Isle of Wight
Islington
Kensington and Chelsea
Kent
Kettering
King`s Lynn and West Norfolk
Kingston upon Hull, City of
Kirklees
Knowsley
Lambeth
Lancaster
Leeds
Leicester
Leicestershire
Lewes – Easbourne
Lewisham
Lichfield
Lincoln
Lincolnshire
Lisburn and Castlereagh
Liverpool
Luton
Maldon
Malvern Hills
Manchester
Mansfield
Medway
Melton
Mendip
Merton
Mid and East Antrim
Mid Devon
Mid Suffolk
Mid Sussex
Mid Ulster
Middlesbrough
Midlothian
Mole Valley
Moray
Neath Port Talbot
New Forest
Newark and Sherwood
Newcastle-under-Lyme
Newham
Newport
Newry, Mourne and Down
Norfolk
North Ayrshire
North Devon
North East Derbyshire
North East Lincolnshire
North Hertfordshire
North Kesteven
North Lanarkshire
North Lincolnshire
North Norfolk
North Somerset
North Tyneside
North Warwickshire
North West Leicestershire
North Yorkshire
Northampton
Northumberland
Norwich
Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
Nuneaton and Bedworth
Oadby and Wigston
Oldham
Orkney Islands
Oxford
Oxfordshire
Pembrokeshire
Pendle
Perth and Kinross
Peterborough
Plymouth
Poole
Portsmouth
Powys
Preston
Reading
Redcar and Cleveland
Reigate and Banstead
Renfrewshire
Rhondda, Cynon, Taff
Ribble Valley
Richmond upon Thames
Richmondshire
Rochford
Rossendale
Rother
Rotherham
Rugby
Runnymede
Rushcliffe
Rushmoor
Rutland
Ryedale
Salford
Scarborough
Scottish Borders
Sedgemoor
Selby
Sevenoaks
Shetland Islands
Shropshire
Slough
Somerset
Somerset West & Taunton
South Ayrshire
South Bucks
South Cambridgeshire
South Derbyshire
South Hams
South Holland
South Kesteven
South Lakeland
South Lanarkshire
South Norfolk
South Northamptonshire
South Oxfordshire
South Ribble
South Somerset
South Staffordshire
South Tyneside
Southend-on-Sea
Southwark
Spelthorne
St Albans
St Edmundsbury
St. Helens
Stafford
Staffordshire Moorlands
Stevenage
Stirling
Stockport
Stockton-on-Tees
Stoke-on-Trent
Stratford-on-Avon
Stroud
Suffolk
Sunderland
Surrey
Surrey Heath
Swale
Swindon
Tamworth
Tandridge
Taunton Deane
Teignbridge
Tendring
Test Valley
Tewkesbury
Thanet
Three Rivers
Thurrock
Tonbridge and Malling
Torridge
Tower Hamlets
Trafford
Tunbridge Wells
Uttlesford
Vale of White Horse
Walsall
Waltham Forest
Warrington
Warwick
Warwickshire
Watford
Waverley
Wealden
Wellingborough
Welwyn Hatfield
West Berkshire
West Devon
West Dunbartonshire
West Lancashire
West lindsey
West Lothian
West Oxfordshire
West Sufolk
West Sussex
Westminster
Wigan
Wiltshire
Winchester
Windsor and Maidenhead
Woking
Wolverhampton
Worcester
Worcestershire
Worthing
Wychavon
Wycombe
Wyre Forest
York
Please note: all UK county, metropolitan, unitary, district, and borough councils should be on the list. If your council is not there, fill in our contact form to let us know. We’re also happy to add other public sector organisations to the list – just get in touch.
Why do I need to check our website cookies?
Rules on the use of tracking cookies by website publishers are being continually tightened up and scrutinised by regulators.
You can find out more about the current regulations on our Q&A page, but the key thing to bear in mind is that data privacy and ‘cookie control’ is not just about GDPR compliance.
The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR or ‘E-privacy Directive’) – last updated in 2019 – state NO ‘non-essential cookies’ should be dropped onto web browsers without first getting explicit prior permission from the user.
This includes anything that’s not part of the ‘plumbing’ of a website – like cookies used for analytics, customisation, functionality or performance. Most website publishers – including big brands and news organisations – are not yet fully compliant with this regulation. Are you?
Websites without advertising are still at risk of non-compliance.
At CAN we run an advertising network for local government organisations, including around 50 local councils. Companies like ours have to be particularly vigilant when it comes to regulations governing the use of cookies as – in order to deliver ads tailored to individual interests – we have to collect a small amount of what’s considered ‘Personally Identifiable Information (PII)’ data from tracking cookies.
However, although current regulations are very concerned with consent around PII, when it comes to tracking cookies, the most recent guidance makes no distinction between advertising cookies and any other ‘non-essential’ cookies – like those used for analytics or social media, which most councils use.
In fact, there are cases – such as with Google’s ‘Doubleclick’ – when a cookie that could potentially be used for advertising is loaded as part of a suite of analytics tools, even though no ads are running on the website.
What will the report tell me?
Your SiteSCAN report will list all the tracking cookies served to visitors when they go onto your website, before they give their consent. These will be categorised so you can easily identify which ones are ‘non-essential’. It will also provide information on the vendors who originated these cookies.
If you’d like a SiteSCAN report on a council website, we can provide this free of charge. Just click on the button below and fill in your name, the name of the council(s) you want a report on, and your council email address. Your report(s) will then be emailed to you.
How do I interpret the results?
If you find non-essential cookies listed on your SiteSCAN report, it means you have an issue with non-compliance as only those categorised as ‘essential’ are allowed to be deployed before consent under current regulations.
The key to compliance is having an adequate data consent management solution on your website that will withhold all non-essential cookies until consent is given by the user.
The most well-used Internet Advertising Bureau-approved consent tools are Cookiebot and Quantcast. You can find out more on the IAB Europe website.
CAN has developed a consent management platform especially for the public sector: CAN Accord. Powered by the well-used Quantcast solution, it has added code that ‘wraps’ around non-essential tracking cookies on your website so they are withheld indefinitely until consent is given.
It is a solution we’ve made available FREE to all UK councils to help get the whole sector compliant.
Find out more about CAN’s FREE consent management platform for councils – CAN Accord – and contact us for your own version and implementation instructions or with any queries.
You can discover the current state of play with local council compliance on our ‘Comply-ometer’ here!