GAO Recommends Cookie Policy For U.S. Govt.

Jim Madison writes: "The General Accounting Office (GAO) has issued a report today 'Internet Privacy: Implementation of Federal Guidance for Agency Use of "Cookies".' In it, they recommended that Federal agencies abide by a four point standard for the use of cookies: (1) clear notice (2)compelling need (3) public stated privacy safeguards for tracking info, and (4) approval by agency head. Only 8 of 65 agencies they checked in the study use persistent cookies, of which 4 did not even have privacy policies and none met the entire 4 point test. All agencies have agreed to comply; it sounds like a step in the right direction to me at least. What's the harm in the government collecting that info anyway, right?" Personally, I think the government should have to ask nicely before gathering any information via cookies, like Sen. Robert Torricelli has proposed for private firms. Other than that, these guidelines seem blandly sensible.

Comments

Forget cookies -- you're munching on 1x1 GIF's

[teambpsi]

Those insiduous little 1 pixel by 1 pixel GIF's are more pervasuive than you might realize. Turning off cookies won't help you either -- the clever little laddies at the ad-tracking co's are using "non-caching" 1x1 pixels GIF's to track your return visits to a site

So you either turn off your cache (which you can't completely do in Exploder with its 1M minimum, but can thankfully in Netscrape) -- or you disable images....

Cha! Like ANYONE other than WAP users actually do that...

I guess what we could do is build a cookie-proxy system that would allow you to use cookies for the session -- but toast them automagically after logout.

Cookies are a fact of the net -- I simply cannot access my online bank account without them enabled -- sure i could switch banks because of this -- but i think in this case I would WANT the bank to have tracked access to my account.

The Government tracking my PR0N consumption is another matter all together ;)