Share interesting pages via social media: Now AVG-Proof

The ability to share pages via social media is not new. Since the rise of social media, there has always been a need to share interesting websites. This can be done via the so-called 'social share buttons'. Now this functionality is also AVG-Proof.

You probably know them. There are usually a number of icons of the most frequently used social media at the bottom of the page. Think of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Whatsapp. When you as a visitor click on one of the icons, you are neatly directed to the social platform where you immediately get the option to share the page.

Since the tightened privacy legislation AVG (enforced since May 2018), there has been a change in the 'social share buttons'. Many used social sharing services (such as AddThis) easily allow a website owner to activate these icons. With this, however, there is also a quid pro quo: AddThis gains the ability to analyse your website's traffic (via so-called tracking cookies). The new legislation stipulates that a visitor must give explicit permission for this before the data can be used. Until recently, Citynavigator used AddThis' services.

Because protecting the personal data of visitors to our websites is important to us, we have decided not to offer the use of AddThis as standard.

To better control and guarantee the privacy of your visitors, we have chosen not to support existing services anymore. Instead, we have realised our own sharing option.

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What will change with the new sharing functionality?

Basically, a website visitor will not notice any difference: the familiar icons are still in the same place within the website and the ability to share pages works identically. The biggest difference: no explicit permission from a visitor is needed to display these icons, as no visitor data is tracked and exchanged with external services.

Please note: to share a page on a social platform (for example: Facebook), a visitor obviously needs to have an account and the conditions of the various social media apply. The visitor himself can decide whether/not to allow (tracking) cookies per social network.

It also improves website speed. Because we no longer need to use external services, we can load the social share buttons faster, which results in faster pages and a faster website.

It is now also possible to add social share buttons to an editorial page. An additional page part has been developed, with which you can easily determine where the share icons can be displayed.

With the upcoming update, all social share buttons for your own website will automatically be reactivated and the new pagepart will also become available.