11–20 of 54 posts
It seems that the bigger companies (BBC, Amazon, etc.) have just gotten away with having a link to their cookies policy in the footer, while the smaller guys (e.g. the web dev place I work at) have been scared into placing often intrusive JS notifications that grab the user's attention needlessly. If the average user were to even understand what cookies were, I could see at least some reasoning behind the law, but as…
It seems that the bigger companies (BBC, Amazon, etc.) have just gotten away with having a link to their cookies policy in the footer, while the smaller guys (e.g. the web dev place I work at) have been scared into placing often intrusive JS notifications that grab the user's attention needlessly. If the average user were to even understand what cookies were, I could see at least some reasoning behind the law, but as…
The BBC had an annoying popup banner thing.
It seems that the bigger companies (BBC, Amazon, etc.) have just gotten away with having a link to their cookies policy in the footer, while the smaller guys (e.g. the web dev place I work at) have been scared into placing often intrusive JS notifications that grab the user's attention needlessly. If the average user were to even understand what cookies were, I could see at least some reasoning behind the law, but as…
The BBC had an annoying popup banner thing.
I admit to not spending the time to read the actual law text (mainly because it seems so ridiculous), but can't it be worked around using other technologies? If the law bans cookies, can't sites just switch to using WebStorage/IndexedDB/webkit FileSystem to achieve the same thing, but not using cookies? Thus actual bad guys have a workaround, and the good guys who keep using cookies because they're useful are apparen…
>The law which applies to how you use cookies and similar technologies for storing information on a user’s equipment such as their computer or mobile device changed on 26 May 2011.
http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electron...
The EU cookie law is so stupid and full of holes that it's absolutely ridiculous. Also nobody seems to know how to implement it properly so most people just don't. This includes a lot of government websites and EU organisations, even the EU's main website http://europa.eu/ doesn't comply with the law. If ever there was a bad case of Politicians trying to reach a noble goal (in this case caring about a users privacy)…
In principle the law has an honest objective to increase user awareness of cookies. I just don't understand all the developers on here jumping around at the outrageousness of the law when the ICO in the UK is obviously taking a relaxed approach to enforcement.
Obviously the problem is that a law as drafted could be applied as drafted however I think there is room for a pragmatic approach here which acknowledges a) the type and sophistication of the site and its users b) the type of cookies being used and c) the risk of a user being harmed or making a complaint.
If so, could you please pin-point which part of the directive you do not like? Which part are hard to implement? Can you also explain us (with the same verve used to bash the directive) how your national implementation is even worse than the EU-wide directive?
The directive is quite short, definitely shorter than a review of a new Mac OS X release. Give it a try.
Spoiler: the word "cookie" is not used in the law, only in the explanatory preamble.
[1] latest consolidated version of the EU e-Privacy directive http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLE...