Cookie recipes
Like a lot of technology law, the EU cookie directive is well intentioned, but you always have to wonder if the legislators understand the nitty-gritty of computer systems.
Cookies are those tiny files that browsers can store on your computer that allows a website to do all manner of useful things such as store a log in credential on a password protected site, build up a basket of items on a shopping site, or remember your usability preferences (layouts, colour schemes and font sizes for example). Those are all good uses of the cookie. However, they are also used extensively by the advertising industry (including Google Analytics) who want to keep track of you and know how often you revisit a website site, what other sites you visit, and ideally they want to match you up with other information loved by the marketeers such as your age, sex, postcode, interests, finances, and more.
Understandably, many people feel that some of these practices invade their privacy and don't want marketing companies building up electronic dossiers on their surfing habits, no matter how much the advertising industry tells us it will allow them to target us with ads for things we want and enrich our internet experience.
As part of its package of telecoms reforms, the EU decided that Europe's citizens should have the legal right to privacy and to reject these tracking cookies. But whilst it is easy to explain roughly how some cookies are good or even essential, and others are just there to keep tabs on us, putting that into watertight legal terms is very hard indeed.
The directive should have come into force on May 26th of this year, with a 12 month grace period for webmasters to fix sites before fines are levied, but so far only two EU states, Denmark and Estonia, claim to have put the directive into their national legislation. The UK government believes that its e-Privacy laws already meet the requirements of Brussels but the the Commission is questioning that. Most other EU states are struggling with the legislation involved.
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has changed its website to reflect what it believes is best practice on cookie handling by including this message on every page of its website:
"The ICO would like to use cookies to store information on your computer, to improve our website. One of the cookies we use is essential for parts of the site to operate and has already been set. You may delete and block all cookies from this site, but parts of the site will not work. To find out more about the cookies we use and how to delete them, see our privacy notice."
As far as I can see, the only way of getting rid of this annoying message which eats into the screen space is to accept the cookie, so whilst this solution may be legal, it isn't friendly and surely doesn't do what the law was intended to achieve. The ICO has revealed that despite the nagging nature of this message, more than 90% of the visitors to the site chose not to accept the cookies, and if that was to become the norm for EU based websites it would be a severe blow for the profiling industry.
29th July 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.