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EU May Outlaw Cookies
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.
The EU appears headed toward a classic error - they haven't defined the problem correctly. Instead of asking "how can we protect the privacy of our citizens" they asked "how can we prevent organizations from using this specific technology to invade our citizens privacy."
Whoever proposed this absolute ban on cookies clearly has never done any kind of web development. Sheesh.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I can see banning long-duration cookies, but e commerse would collapse without the session cookie, or something functionally eqivelant. A better rule would be to require browser makers to provide better granularity in cookie preferences, and to make the settings more conspicuous.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
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.
What will we do when cookie monster is removed from the cast of Sesamee Street?
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It sounds like all they want is a method to have the user explicitely agree to accept a cookie whenever one's proposed. Many (most?) browsers already support that functionality. Maybe browsers just need to ship with that defaulted to "on" for EU countries. I don't really understand why they're making such a fuss.
To be honest, I think they're going about this thing entirely the wrong way. Don't attack a technology because it has the *ability* to do something you don't like. Attack those that are abusing the technology. In this case, full and proper support for the W3C's P3P initiative looks like it addresses all of the privacy concerns that go with cookies. Maybe they should be looking at this instead.
One thing Microsoft has done right recently is P3P support in IE6, and setting the browser to default itself to what I would consider a reasonable setting out of the box, which automatically blocks a significant number of 3rd-party cookies. I love seeing this in action.
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.
Reading the Yahoo story, its pretty clear the author took the Internet Advertising Board's press release and printed it almost verbatim.
The proposed legislation has nothing to do with browser cookies, it focuses on regulating what kinds of private information marketing scum can gather and share without permission. The bill aims to prevent marketing firms from using any data obtained through illicit or decietful means to be correlated with personal identities. It would also prevent marketing from using personal information to gather other info through other means.
Web sites could still set cookies on your browser, and even track sessions from one logon to the next. But the web sites would not be allowed to match that information with individual identities. They could still gather statistics, monitor actions, and anything else cookies are useful for, but not for targetting individuals.
This legislation was proposed before, but was stalled after the IAB and a few other telemarketing firms pooled their money to fight it. It has been delayed for a while, but is back for another round.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
That's just crap.
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Cookies are needed for only one thing. Every other current use for cookies can be done better without them, or (IMNSHO) shouldn't be done at all. The best example is session tracking. Those of my websites which need to track sessions all use URI mangling to do so.
For instance, look at my website for AdAce. When you go there, you get immediately redirected to a URI that includes session information, that looks something like this: http://www.adace.com/0123456789abcdef0123456789ab
The long hex number and the comma-delimited string constitute your session id. No cookie needed. By using relative URIs in all the webpages, there's no problem with the mangled session information being lost: the browser thinks that its just a directory path. In those few places where we need to use absolute URIs, we use a cgi or an apache content handler to modify the URI in place to include the correct session id. This number is used to look up your session data in a daemon running a simple database for that purpose -- and to verify that the comma delimited string hasn't been tampered with. The database exists purely in RAM. I've even locked the pages in place so there's no danger of them getting swapped. None of your session data ever goes onto a hard disk; only the fact of the session, as it appears in the server logs. My cgis (and a couple special purpose apache modules) all use an API library that I wrote in order to communicate with this daemon. That lets them get data out of your session record, and put data into it. The point of all this is that we hold the burden of maintaining your session information. No need for cookies.
The only function provided by cookies that can't be done in any other way is what we in the advertising industry call "frequency capping". The idea is that you (the advertiser) have bought a big campaign with a lot of impressions, but you don't want one user to see your campaign more than, say, 3 times. So we need some way to track how often you've seen a particular campaign. If the campaign is all running on a single website, then it's easy enough to use other methods. But when the campaign is running across at least two unrelated websites, the adservers have to create and manipulate a cookie in order to track this.
If you've ever received a cookie whose name is RMID, and whose value is just a number, then you've received one of these cookies. They're generated by RealMedia's (not to be confused with Real Networks, the makers of realmedia player) ad server for campaigns that have frequency capping turned on.
These cookies are the only cookies ever generated or inspected by any AdAce machine. I am strongly opposed to the use of cookies in any situation where some other method is possible. And as CSO of AdAce, I've put my foot down on this issue: no cookies where we can do something else, and even if we can't do something else, no cookies if its possible for it to be exploited by acquisition, mismanagement, or subpeona, to violate someone's privacy.
(incidentally, this form of session tracking gives WebTrends conniption fits -- that's the main reason that I'm writing my own log analyzer)
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.