What if you had to receive consent to place a cookie on a user's computer? As an online publisher or digital marketer, you might find it very difficult to operate.
But that's exactly what an amendment that will be voted on in the EU Parliament considers requiring.
Needless to say, the proposed amendment that would require cookie consent is meeting fierce opposition from online interests such as the IAB.
The vice president of IAB Europe, Kimon Zorbas, noted that privacy policies already required by law in the EU provide disclosures about cookies and tracking and he argues that "This amendment, if adopted, risks changing the way the Internet works today".
I'd agree. As Zorbas also mentions, users already have the ability to manage privacy settings and deny cookies through existing technology. Trying to fix something that isn't broken in an unfeasible manner, jeopardizing the user experience in the process, is ill-conceived. Many commonly-used applications employ cookies for a variety of techniques that are completely innocuous. From blogging platforms to shopping carts, I'm not sure the EU Parliament recognizes how much consent their proposed rule would require.
What's interesting to me is that the EU Parliament would seriously consider such a law following the implementation of the email and browsing history retention rules that just went into effect. These require ISPs to store basic details about their customers' email communications and browsing history.
All in the name of security, of course. The irony is that this law potentially creates even more security risks for consumers. As Neil Cook of message security firm Cloudmark pointed out, "Considering the sheer volume of high-profile security breaches hitting the headlines in the UK, the protection and storage of data is of paramount importance to an organisation".
If all this seems absurd to you, it seems absurd to me. Hopefully this proposed amendment will not pass and we can move on with a real discussion about consumer privacy on the internet with realistic policy suggestions.
While this article is from April 7th, this madness is STILL going on. High-paid idiots who have no clue about the internet about to act like the elephant in the pocelian shop, leaving only ruins behind.
Imagine having to aprove every little shit, being annoyed to no end by an endless stream of pop-up that ask you constantly "Are you sure?" "Are you really sure?".
So they want users to have to manually accept each and every cookie that comes their way? Don't most browsers already have this feature built in if users really want high-level security?
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
General Zod wrote:So they want users to have to manually accept each and every cookie that comes their way? Don't most browsers already have this feature built in if users really want high-level security?
Firefox at least does. The thing asks what you want to do whenever a new site wants to add a cookie, and then uses your selection as a rule for that site (it of course can be changed later on if you wish). I tried it on a lark, and actually found it pretty nice and left it on. It's not much of a hassle for me, since my rule is deny everything except the ~5 sites I regularly visit that really require cookies for something useful. Completely murders adware, I used to get maybe 50-100 detections running Ad-Aware once a month or two. Now it's maybe 5-10 per scan at similar intervals.
"Death before dishonour" they say, but how much dishonour are we talking about exactly? I mean, I can handle a lot. I could fellate a smurf if the alternative was death.
- Dylan Moran
We already have a law that requires web pages that use cookies to tell the user that 1) the site is using cookies, 2) what they are used for, and 3) how to avoid cookies. Usually this is done through some disclaimer. It's totally ridiculous. What do they think the cookies are going to do to the poor users? It's supposedly to protect the "integrity" of the consumers, which is hilarious considering that cookies are only tied to their originating web sites, where the servers could track your activities anyway, just in a much more cumbersome way. And even more hilarious now that EU makes all member states pass laws that require ISPs to give private corporations access to personal details connected to a certain IP address, if they suspect they have violating intellectual property rights. Protecting integrity indeed...
"Nippon ichi, bitches! Boing-boing." Mai smote the demonic fires of heck...
Tracking cookies actually improve security, because without them you have to assume that one IP = one user. This works most of the time, but it gets screwed up when multiple users sit behind NAT or when an ISP reallocates its IP pool (this happens rarely for broadband users). As a result if you turn cookies off you will end up leaking information to other users. Usually this isn't a big deal, they just end up seeing ads based on your browsing history, but that could potentially be quite embarassing.
