21–30 of 43 posts
I'm not sure how we got from there to here - a sub-optimal law and not-great research (81 sites?) all while companies aggressively collect and mine data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I visit the ICO site I also get a "civicCookieControl" cookie which you don't list. I guess that this is probably coming from javascript and your site isn't processing this?
It's running a headless browser with JS enabled so it should be there... not sure why it doesn't pick it up. Thanks for the mention :-)
I'd be interested in the solutions you used to solve issues like that if it's not proprietary / private.
This article is completely incompetent. Firstly - any number of cookies from a single domain are equivalent, you can always use whatever identifier is in the cookie's data to store and retrieve an arbitrary amount of data about the user. That there are lots of them implies either that the site is using a bunch of different front end libraries / components that don't talk to one another (which is irrelevant from a pri…
In a way instantly accessible to the host site. Data I wasn't really consulted about. Data I might not be comfortable sharing every time you ask for it.
This whole law about disclosing cookie use, which I will agree is not necessarily a good approach to the problem, does nevertheless exist because of a problem - People getting tracked, followed and profiled without their permission. Website operators and browser-makers seemed to be complicit in this. Some website operators seem to think it's their god-given right to do whatever they want in the browser on my computer...
This article is completely incompetent. Firstly - any number of cookies from a single domain are equivalent, you can always use whatever identifier is in the cookie's data to store and retrieve an arbitrary amount of data about the user. That there are lots of them implies either that the site is using a bunch of different front end libraries / components that don't talk to one another (which is irrelevant from a pri…
The article is accurate and provides details of the methodology and results. Of particular note, if you look at the report, is that two thirds of cookies on UK sites are third-party ones. That's a significant number, and means the average site places 30 third-party cookies on a users machine.
Your proviso about being 'from a single domain' is pretty much irrelevant – that's not the issue at all!
It seems a bit disingenuous to present numbers like that. For the lay person, it may sound scary that there as 44 cookies on a given page, but that's a completely arbitrary measure. I would think that the important thing isn't the number of cookies, but rather what which entities they are shared with and to some extend the information attached to them. First party cookie for example are not a privacy issue at all.
Self plug: we've developed cookie-checker.com. A way to check which cookies are placed with first time visitor. ico.org.uk places 3 cookies (1 session, 2 other valid up to today and 2017): http://www.cookie-checker.com/check-cookies.php?url=ico.org....
humorously, checking the site itself seems to trip it up: http://www.cookie-checker.com/check-cookies.php?url=cookie-c...
When cookies were first introduced a number of sensible people had reasonable concerns about privacy. I'm not sure how we got from there to here - a sub-optimal law and not-great research (81 sites?) all while companies aggressively collect and mine data.
It seems a bit disingenuous to present numbers like that. For the lay person, it may sound scary that there as 44 cookies on a given page, but that's a completely arbitrary measure. I would think that the important thing isn't the number of cookies, but rather what which entities they are shared with and to some extend the information attached to them. First party cookie for example are not a privacy issue at all.
In my opinion it is actually pretty scary. As I see it, a website should upon landing either set zero or one cookie, depending on if the website has some sort of persistent functionality (like a message to first time visitors). The other 43 cookies are, in my view, therefore unnecessary to the normal functioning of the website, and is therefore more likely being used for other purposes such as tracking and advertisin…
In my experience it's usually the marketing department that want much, not all, of the things that end up setting cookies. It's not that it's a bad idea necessarily, but it's adding tracking upon tracking upon tracking and rarely a request to remove something. Some sales person try to sell marketing "Yet another up-sell tool" or "customer retention solution" and no one considers that the site already have five of those tools installed, 3 of which isn't actually used anymore and the last two we aren't really sure of.
I think it's a scam mostly, trying to convince businesses that they're leaving profit on the floor. The providers of these tools leave real businesses jumping from one tracking/data-mining/customer-spying to another in the hope that it will boost their sales by a few percent. Do we really need to know know that much about our customer? Probably not.
This article is completely incompetent. Firstly - any number of cookies from a single domain are equivalent, you can always use whatever identifier is in the cookie's data to store and retrieve an arbitrary amount of data about the user. That there are lots of them implies either that the site is using a bunch of different front end libraries / components that don't talk to one another (which is irrelevant from a pri…
I completely disagree with your assessment, and I don't understand why you're so offended by it. The article is accurate and provides details of the methodology and results. Of particular note, if you look at the report, is that two thirds of cookies on UK sites are third-party ones. That's a significant number, and means the average site places 30 third-party cookies on a users machine. Your proviso about being 'fro…
That said, the article's focus on 31st December 9999 and outliving the lifespan of the user, the discussion around the number of cookies served (rather than the number of parties serving cookies, and the amount and type of data that they're storing, which is what we're really concerned about here), and the click-baity headline to both the page and the HN article take what was probably a very sensible study and pervert the reader into drawing conclusions for all the wrong reasons. Giving public funding to something that's going to place that sort of bias (which in a private news publication would be fine) between the public and science I find pretty galling.
Yes it takes some effort to delete them, but so does looking left and right before crossing the street.