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EU May Outlaw Cookies

Posted by timothy on from the use-tasty-apples-instead dept.

Millennium writes: "According to Yahoo News, The European Commission is considering a privacy directive which, among other things, completely bans the use of cookies. Forgive me for saying so, but considering all the legitimate uses of cookies, isn't banning them outright going just a bit too far?" Update: 10/31 19:21 GMT by M : The submitter's write-up is wrong. Read the story. Keep in mind, as usual, that a "news" story whose sole source is an executive with an agenda to push is unlikely to portray the situation accurately.

2 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Outlawing Cookies by BoyPlankton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While I realize their security concerns, in my opinion the problem isn't with the cookies. The bigger security concern, is really with web bugs. The rest of the stuff that the EU seems to be concerned about really is data that could be generated by analyzing web server logs. The problem is with sites that monitor people across multiple domains.

  2. They aren't going to ban them. by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From what I read, they aren't banning cookies per se. What they're banning is any collection of personal information without explicit informed consent. So you can use cookies all you want, as long as you tell the user what personal information you're storing in them and let them say whether they want to allow it or not. And if you use cookies for things like shopping carts, where there's no personal information in them, then there's no restrictions on them. All perfectly sensible to me.