New feature from Cookiebot – REQUIRING YOUR ACTION! email

Hi team,

We recently received this e-mail from Cookiebot:

New feature from Cookiebot – REQUIRING YOUR ACTION! email

Exciting news! We are proud to let you know that we are launching a ground-breaking and unique feature to dramatically simplify the implementation of 'prior consent' cookie control. 'Prior consent' means not loading cookies except those strictly necessary, until consent has been given.

Why this is important
This new feature will make it much easier for you and your customers to comply with the prior consent requirements of both GDPR, the existing ePrivacy directive (soon to become an EU-wide regulation) and the updated guidelines on cookies that have recently been published from the British ICO, the French CNIL and are on the way from other European data protection agencies.

From manual to automated implementation
The new feature removes the need to manually mark up all cookie-setting scripts on a website to control cookies. With an updated cookie banner script, the Cookiebot solution now handles cookie-controlling automatically. This dramatically reduces the initial implementation time and eliminates the ongoing need to mark up any new cookie-setting scripts. This will be turned on as standard for new customers. However, the choice between manual & automatic will be available for all customers in the Manager when logging on to their Cookiebot account. For existing customers, a minor modification of the Cookiebot script tag is needed to activate the new feature - see instructions below.

You might have non-compliant customers today
At the bottom of this email you will find a list of the existing domains under your management, if any, where our scanner has identified issues with the implementation of prior consent. Note that you can also track prior consent compliance in the Cookiebot monthly scan reports.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO
You need to make sure that any existing customers who have yet to reach full compliance with prior consent or those who just want to switch to automated cookie-control, indeed get this implemented as soon as possible. The adjustments to the existing cookie banner script can be made from September 10 by following the small guide at the bottom of the email. Your customers will NOT receive direct notifications or instructions from us on this matter.

When you register a new domain in Cookiebot, the automatic cookie-control will work from when the initial scan of the domain has completed. This means that you should wait to implement the Cookiebot script tag on the customer's website until the first scan has completed.

The current manual implementation method will continue to be supported and can co-exist with the automatic cookie control.

Please note, if you are using Google Tag Manager (GTM) for implementation, no changes are needed in the implementation, as cookie control is handled within GTM itself.

Launch September 10
You will see the new feature controls in the Manager on September 10. General information on our website, including an updated implementation guide (https://www.cookiebot.com/goto/help/), Help Center articles (https://support.cookiebot.com/hc/en-us) as well as general communication to all non-reseller customers will be part of the public launch on September 10.

Thank you!
We know that the implementation process for prior consent has not been straight forward up until now and we sincerely appreciate all your hard work on this. Cookiebot is deeply committed to continuously simplifying the task of getting your customers fully compliant and we hope that you are as excited as us about Cookiebot setting this new industry benchmark!

If you have any further questions, we're here to help! Please write us at reseller@cookiebot.com (in English). 

Kind regards, 
The Cookiebot team 

How to enable the automatic cookie-control on a website that already uses Cookiebot - from September 10
The script which is currently inserted in the header of the website to display the cookie banner looks like this:

<script id="Cookiebot" src="https://consent.cookiebot.com/uc.js" data-cbid="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" type="text/javascript" async></script>

To enable the automatic cookie-control, the script needs a bit of editing: Remove the async attribute and add a data-blockingmode="auto" attribute so that the script looks like this:

<script id="Cookiebot" src="https://consent.cookiebot.com/uc.js" data-cbid="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" type="text/javascript" data-blockingmode="auto"></script>

The zeroes are replaced with the cbid-number from the relevant domain group on your Cookiebot account ("Your scripts" tab under "Settings" menu point). Then, if this is not already the case, make sure that the script is placed as THE VERY FIRST SCRIPT on the website. Cookies will now be blocked prior to consent and controlled automatically based on what the website user has consented to. 

From my understand what we need to do to achieve this is the following:

1. Update cookiebot plugin to 3.x
2. Go to its settings page e.g. /wp-admin/admin.php?page=cookiebot
3. On that page, set the following settings:
• Cookie-blocking mode = Automatic
• Add async or defer attribute Consent banner script tag = None
• Add async or defer attribute Cookie declaration script tag = None
4. Clear all cache
5. Done.

But when we set the Cookie-blocking mode to Automatic the websites stop to work properly and we can see this error on console:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'insertBefore' of null
at CookieControl.Cookie.processMutation (uc.js:1)
at MutationObserver.mutationHandler (uc.js:1)

Can you please let us know how we should proceed in this case?

Yours,
Victor