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The stupid cookie law is dead at last

blog.silktide.com

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#11
post #3

Well at least they realised they were being a bit thick; they could have just kept on blindly enforcing it. I think it really hit home when they lost a serious percentage of their analytics data.

A "serious amount of their analytics data" was already lost to US.com

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#12
post #8

A similar law is still going strong in The Netherlands. As of this year, most Dutch sites greet you with an annoying pop-up.

IIRC its an EU directive (ePrivacy), which each member state has to implement. Hopefully, everyone will see sense with directive.

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#13

Browsers already have the ability to ask the user if they want to accept a cookie. So all this law did was reproduced browser functionality that has existed all the way back to Netscape. That all being said however, I'm not entirely sure it is "dead." The current legal standing from my understanding is a grey area...

No, the law also prohibited use (without permission) of such things as flash cookies and cookie-like things stored in HTML5's web storage, HTTP ETags, IE userData storage, Silverlight isolated storage, etc. The browser has no control over these things, only standard HTTP cookies for which it is responsible.

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#14
post #5

The cookie law is in no way dead, the ICO is just doing what every other 'compliant' site has always done. New policy for the ICO site: > Cookies set on arrival to the site. New cookies banner displayed. Banner explains that the website uses cookies and that cookies have been set, tells users they can change their cookie settings (via a new cookies page), or continue to use the site. I always thought the "set first a…

Rather than what Silktide are saying, this change just seems to be bringing their own website into line with their last-minute clarification (or rather u-turn) on implicit consent.

The ICO spent a year banging on about how you need explicit consent, and lots of people ran around implementing various solutions that make people click buttons and are generally incredibly annoying. Then, about 12 hours before the law came into effect, the ICO said "Actually, you know what? Implicit consent is fine."

On the off-chance anyone is still interested in this sort of thing, I wrote a small implicit consent script after the ICO clarified their position: http://radiac.net/projects/cookieuse/

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#15
post #10
post #8

A similar law is still going strong in The Netherlands. As of this year, most Dutch sites greet you with an annoying pop-up.

Annoyance, related to privacy. I vote for being "annoyed".

Shame is that at many sites it’s not really opt-in. If you disagree, you get a lecture on why the site is obliged to track you and then you can accept anyway or leave. A cookie wall, if you will.

Examples:

* http://tweakers.net

* http://nos.nl

* http://uitzendinggemist.nl

NOS (public news broadcaster) and Uitzending Gemist (public television catch up) are interesting cases because apparently they’re actually required by law to collect user statistics.

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#17
post #8

A similar law is still going strong in The Netherlands. As of this year, most Dutch sites greet you with an annoying pop-up.

One thing that is still unclear to me about the Dutch law:

Is the Dutch law only for .nl domains? Domains hosted in NL? Sites owned by Dutch companies?

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#18

Browsers already have the ability to ask the user if they want to accept a cookie. So all this law did was reproduced browser functionality that has existed all the way back to Netscape. That all being said however, I'm not entirely sure it is "dead." The current legal standing from my understanding is a grey area...

The law allows you to use standard browser technology, however the default browser settings do not meet the minimum standards of "actually getting consent from the user".

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#19
post #17
post #8

A similar law is still going strong in The Netherlands. As of this year, most Dutch sites greet you with an annoying pop-up.

One thing that is still unclear to me about the Dutch law: Is the Dutch law only for .nl domains? Domains hosted in NL? Sites owned by Dutch companies?

It is nearly always the case that the country the servers are in, and the country the owners (persons/companies) are in is the relevant law.

Imagine a dutch company with servers in the netherlands, witha .com address. Why would they be exempt from dutch law?

Re: The stupid cookie law is dead at last

#20

Browsers already have the ability to ask the user if they want to accept a cookie. So all this law did was reproduced browser functionality that has existed all the way back to Netscape. That all being said however, I'm not entirely sure it is "dead." The current legal standing from my understanding is a grey area...

No, the law also prohibited use (without permission) of such things as flash cookies and cookie-like things stored in HTML5's web storage, HTTP ETags, IE userData storage, Silverlight isolated storage, etc. The browser has no control over these things, only standard HTTP cookies for which it is responsible.

The browser has full control over HTML5 storage.
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