Slashdot Mirror
UK "No Tracking Law" Now In Effect
Fluffeh writes "The British Gov might have more cameras up on street corners than just about anywhere else in the world, but it seems that the Gov doesn't want anyone else stepping on the privacy of their folks. In what the media have dubbed the 'Cookie Law' all operators of websites in Britain must notify users of the tracking that the website does. This doesn't only cover cookies, but all forms of tracking and analytics performed on visitors. While there are potential fines up up to 500,000 pounds (Over US$750,000) for websites not following these new rules, the BBC announced that very few websites are ready, even most of its own sites aren't up to speed — and amusingly even the governments own websites aren't ready."
Been hearing this my whole life.
Be seeing you...
This is another example of what happens when you let computer illiterate politicians have a say in technology regulations
To be fair, the ICO has proven itself utterly inept when it comes to enforcing its own regulations - I can't see them doing any better with this idiocy.
because atm, ghostery reports 10 diffrent tracking entities.
At the same time as this happens across all of Europe, they roll out INDECT and the Data Retention Directive.
How about I follow each of the MEPs around and write down on a list everyone they speak to, when they speak and where, over the course of 6 months? That would probably mark me as a terrorist.
It's true, Europe is the worst country in the world.
While the British government might have implemented, the law comes from the EU.
It actually came in last year and websites were given a year grace to enable the features required.
Its that grace period which has expired, not that the law has now suddenly been introduced.
The same measures have been installed in Germany two days ago.
I think it's another stupid EU thing obligatory for all countries within the EUSSR.
The law itself is pointless as you don't have to warn if the cookie is necessary for the functionality of the website.
In other words : always needed, never need to warn.
The British Gov might have more cameras up on street corners than just about anywhere else in the world
It doesn't, though. The whole "eleventy billion cameras in the UK" thing was made up by one of the screaming right-wing tabloids a few years ago, by counting all the CCTV cameras in about a half-mile stretch of the main street of a fairly scummy part of London, and multiplying by the total length of all the roads in the UK. So, the figure is probably accurate *if* you assume that every single road in the UK has lots of off-licenses, bookmakers, cheque cashing centres, "we buy scrap gold" shops the like - but, it isn't. For the figures to be correct, you'd have to have something like one camera every 60 metres or so on *every single road* right down to farm tracks.
Most cities in the UK have no more CCTV than cities in the US - and if you think US cities don't have CCTV then I wonder what you think CCTV cameras look like...
So as a concerned UK citizen, which government department(s) should I be writing to, to request that they prosecute themselves for running an illegal website?
and nothing to do with the government. However the gov (in the form of the police) likes to trawl them for evidence. Usually the cameras are found to be not working when the police are the wrong-doers.
The whole focus of this has been towards helping people protect their 'privacy'. But look at the implementation on sites and you will know at once that there is no explicit consent. a) They have a pop-up box that allows you to opt out (disappears after 20s) b) There is a link to their 'Cookie page' c) The consent is bundled with other site functionality (i.e. ability to use FB/Twitter with marketing cookies) indirectly forcing users to accept all cookies. Companies are spending thousands of £s on a whole array of solutions since the EU directive and the UK law are still so broad. I think making the non-savvy users aware is the only way forward. At the same time people must realise that the livelihood of hundreds if not thousands of people depends on data gathered from sites.
48 hours before the law came into force, the ICO issued new guidelines at http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2012/updated-ico-advice-guidance-e-privacy-directive-eu-cookie-law.aspx which basically reads as "If the user's browser accepts cookies, then they agree to the cookies being stored". Making the whole things pretty moot. Why they waited until the "11th hour" to state the obvious is annoying...
This is why I left slashdot and only come back once in a blue moon.
The community here has died and been replaced by these people.
Simple:
If it happens in the UK it can't be a "European" thing, since the UK barely belong to the EU. (Norway doesn't belong to the EU either by the way).
If it happens anywhere else in the EU, be it Hungary, Greece, France, Germany, Belgium or whatever, then it's either an European accomplishment or European shame.
Just remember very few people consider the UK as a full EU member and you'll understand better.
The regulations are not actually as crazy as this story makes them out to be. Here are the latest guidance notes from ICO:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2011/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_electronic/Practical_application/guidance_on_the_new_cookies_regulations.ashx (PDF)
Page 10 has a summary table with some examples of banned (ie. explicit permission required) and OK cookies:
It's ironic having this law in the UK while you can be tracked IRL there nearly everywhere by CCTV cameras that identify your face or your car's plate number.
It's true, Europe is the worst country in the world.
Europe is actually a continent.
Where sites have actually implemented this new directive, the implementations often suck just as much as the law, which is not particularly surprising given how poorly it's worded. If you have cookies disabled through your default browser policies the end result on many sites where is a permanantly visible prompt to "Click here to read and accept our cookie policy". Yep, that's right. You have to enable cookies to let them set a cookie that says they will not use cookies to track you.
I'm fairly sure that some of these sites realise that you could set a cookie, immediately try to read it back and if that fails assume cookies are blocked skipping the display of the prompt, and either way you remove the cookie. But no, this law is so poorly written it's not totally clear whether even this would be a breach of the legislation or not and clarification has still not been provided, so as usual for the EU the intention might be good, but the implementation leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. In this case, I can see a number of people are going to end up re-enabling cookies just to get rid of the prompts and end up getting tracked by all those sites who don't implement the law because they are outside the EU's jurisdiction and/or just don't care - completely the opposite of the desired effect.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
gave a flying fuck
It's an opt-out which is mandated. The situation is the same as before, only now the website have to be a little more obvious about what they're doing than they were before.
Other countries, such as the Netherlands, have mandated opt-in. There an actual change is happening.
So corporations (who are really only interested in selling you more or better products) can't watch or track users accessing their own websites, but the UK government (who are in control of the police, the military, health care, social security, education) get to snoop on ALL of its citizens' communications in real-time and without oversight or due suspicion? Madness. In the long term, know who I'd prefer watching my behavior.
I don't live in the UK, but if I did, I'd be signing this: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400 . Doesn't the UK listen to its intellectuals any more? It's unbelievable that Orwell and Huxley have been defeated by the impotent argument of "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear".
I've seen UK based sites start to implement this, but there's no chance that Facebook, Google etc will follow suit - so if the tracking actually does have monetary value, we've just guaranteed that only non-European companies can benefit from it. Woohoo.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Eh? The UK is a member of the EU. That's that. Being in the EU is one thing - membership in the EU. Once that's achieved, the country is a "full" member of the EU. I seriously don't know what you're on about.
Europe is a continent, not a country
What does this mean, if anything, for UK owned sites hosted outside of the Queen's reach?
--- b2b.mallaidh.org | www.mallaidh.org | www.kidsalive.org/article/kahlil-pfaff/
I believe the UK still use their own currency.
On page 3 of http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2011/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_electronic/Practical_application/guidance_on_the_new_cookies_regulations.ashx it states that 37% of users don't know how to manage cookies. So, we've got implied consent where 37% of users don't know how to give consent.
Membership in the EU or the EEC is not the same thing as membership in the Euro (i.e. the currency). The UK is very much part of the EU despite not using the Euro.
captcha: "informs"
Fancy that.
This new law is fucking ludicrus, I generally block all cookies except certain websites, and one of the UK websites I visit has put a pink banner at the top warning about the cookie crap saying I will only see it once, but it relies on cookies to tell wether the banner has already been displayed, meaning it's ALWAYS there because I've blocked cookies on that site.
Who the fuck came up with the idea of using cookies to warn you about the use of cookies?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Then by all logic, ain't you in part fault for that by leaving?
Our press and conservatives required that this happen. Our press is controlled by the same person that controls your Fox "news" and our conservatives are so right wing that they are the most right-wing mainstream party in Europe.
Both of these nasty groups are overjoyed at the financial problems in the Eurozone.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Sound off the sirens! We have an idiot who doesn't understand sarcasm! ALERT! ALERT! Stupid-ass people are afoot!
Bahaha! Soooo many fucktards on /. today! Its amazing. You, sir (or madam), deserve a back-handed slap across your face and a kick in the groin.
FTA, " amusingly even the governments own websites aren't ready." I'd be in favor of an Eat-Your-Own-Dogfood law that stipulates that a) laws that apply to private businesses also apply to the government, and b) no law need be implemented by the private sector until implemented by the government.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I wasn't sure how to moderate this. I'm pretty sure its a super-effective troll. Yet some part of me suggests you might actually be serious so I opted out of wasting a mod point.
Normally these people are kept in warm environments with soft lighting so they can't hurt themselves and cannot be released into the environment because of the damage they would do. But when times are difficult Ministers are looking for good ideas and they get presented with the loony schemes. Inexperienced Ministers - and the current lot are almost all very inexperienced indeed - may get taken in, and so these schemes see the daylight.
Mrs. Thatcher, long may she rot, at least realised that the privatisation of streets and the railways were loony ideas too far. The next Government was inexperienced enough to fall for rail privatisation (unfortunately writing about at least one of the proponents of this here could result in a libel suit).
I do sometimes wonder if, in fact, a number of our Eastern European immigrants are former Stasi members under fake passports who are running the Home Office. But that might be unfair to the Stasi.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Creating laws specific to the technology at hand seems like a complete nonsense to me. Today we use cookies in plain text headers of HTTP. Who knows what's going to be used as a standard in the future! If they use something else other than cookies, then it's OK to be tracked according to this law?
Julio Henrique Morimoto juliohm@gmail.com
Our press and conservatives required that this happen.
Well, them and a strong majority of the British public consistently wanting to stay out of the Euro. But this is Slashdot, so let's not let facts get in the way of a good rant.
And of course, jokes about similarity aside, the Tories haven't actually been the ones running the show since Tony Blair's first New Labour administration took office in 1997. The Conservatives have been the more powerful party in the current coalition since 2010, but for some reason, in the past couple of years no-one from any major UK party has been suggesting that we join the Euro any time soon.
our conservatives are so right wing that they are the most right-wing mainstream party in Europe.
I don't know how true that is, but in any case, the politics in most countries in Europe is rather strongly left-leaning by global standards, in much the same way that both the main parties in the US would be regarded as quite far to the right on a global scale.
Both of these nasty groups are overjoyed at the financial problems in the Eurozone.
Yes, because what we really need right now is for some of our closest neighbours and major trading partners to suffer severe financial problems that will keep our own economy down for a few more years without anything we can do about it. That will definitely help to advance the interests of both of the groups you mentioned, and of course to help the Conservatives to win the next general election outright as they presumably want to.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Eh? The UK is a member of the EU. That's that. Being in the EU is one thing - membership in the EU. Once that's achieved, the country is a "full" member of the EU. I seriously don't know what you're on about.
The UK is in Europe, however it doesn't use the Euro and people in the UK consider Europe to be 'them', not 'us'.
The UK government happily breaks EU laws on stuff like DNA retention and tobacco imports every day. People take the UK government to the European court and win nearly every time yet the UK carries on ignoring EU law.
our conservatives are so right wing that they are the most right-wing mainstream party in Europe.
...and yet on that political axis still fall far short of the US Republicans.
And thankfully the CoE influence on them does not determine policy in anything approaching the same degree as more extreme Christianity does the Republicans.
... which has precisely nothing to do with being an EU member.
That of course doesn't happen in the US. When some folks in Texas want to have creationism in their schools, there is not a single american out there that would suggest its only Texas being the retards.
I mean, with 9/11 you guys sure tried your very best to make every american feel that loss. Looking at the amount of taxpayers cash that went into it, afterwards.
But I still wouldn't call that the same.
Which is their prerogative to do so, and still be a member of the EU.
You might like to Google the relationship between the European Court of Human Rights and the EU.
In the meantime, I'll give you a hint - the ECoHR is not an EU body.
Unless I'm mistaken, the relevany EU document is this and the relevant paragraph is:
In other words, the directive says that when a service tracks users, it should provide clear and comprehensive information about that in as user-friendly way as possible... And specifically says that methods such as users being able to select this in browser settings are fine... and that you don't need to explicitly tell them that you track them the way they expect such a service would track them.
Where to start on this post. Let's kick off with DNA retention. Firstly it was the European Court of Human Rights that ruled on this - and that court is not an EU body, and has nothing to do with the EU. Secondly the UK Supreme Court has also ruled against the UK government on this one, and the government is **still*8 dragging its feet, so by your definitions, presumably the UK is not part of the UK since the UK government dissed a UK court.
Tobacco imports? As far as I can tell the UK is not breaching any elements of EU law on imports and indeed last time it came up the EU courts ruled in the UK's favour http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/nov/24/news.retail
You are talking rubbish. The UK is in Europe and a full member of the European Union. It is not a member of the Eurozone, which is limited to those countries which use the Euro as their currency. Britain is by no means alone in this regard within the EU.
The UK does NOT break EU laws with the sort of abandon that you suggest. For example, the problem with not being able to extradite Abu Qatada initiaily was caused as a result of the European Court of Human Rights saying that it would contravene European law if it went ahead. The UK then had to negotiate with Jordan for specific assurances that evidence obtained through torture would not be used in any legal proceedings taken in Jordan which is why, today, we are still waiting for the extradition to take place. There are numerous other European laws that the UK has had to implement by being a full member of the EU.
All, or perhaps I should more correctly say most, EU countries breach one or more EU laws when those laws clash with local culture, traditions or standards. Each EU nation is then responsible for fighting its own corner to explain why its position should be seen as the exception. For example, open air markets selling goods not meeting EU quality standards or access to many places for the disabled in France.
The directive specifically says that user choosing this kind of things in browser settings is fine. Google respects the "don't track me" thing that browsers enable. Aside from that, I'm not sure that they need to do anything else.
If you care enough to lobby the government, you care nough to be able to find out how to disable cookies on your browser. Do I have to inform users that Apache saves logs?
I mean, with 9/11 you guys sure tried your very best to make every american feel that loss. Looking at the amount of taxpayers cash that went into it, afterwards.
And yet we still haven't rebuilt the damned towers. You'd think we could at least get a couple cool skyscrapers out of the damned trillion dollars we've pissed away on wars and homeland security.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Go back to drinking the Kool-Aid. There is no single "press" in the UK.
most folks don't say "I think ...." simply because they are not in the practice of actually thinking.
if you saw a 2 foot high neon sign on a store stating "Everything Yogurt & Salad Cafe" would you think the place had icecream??
the number one question asked when i had that job: "Y'all have Icecream???"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
> Doesn't even matter if the shit happened in
> Hungarian and you live in Norway, you somehow
> want to take credit.
I think you mean "...and you live in Norwegian..."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Try finding anyone in the UK who gives a damn about prisoner voting rights. Prisoners abused other people's rights, which landed them in prison.
Being in prison removes several rights, the most notable being freedom of movement. In this case, it limits freedom of movement to and from polling stations.
Ha, the UK is more "in" Europe than any other country bar Germany. Can you name any other country that so slavishly implements directives? Where the politicians are so fanatically pro-EU? Sure, the population think the government is anti-Europe but the population are idiots and easily misled, imagining that their "pounds" and their "pints" are a sign of some national independence, when they are really nothing more than a regional indulgence granted by central government. And the press reinforces this, by publishing either "Euroscepticism" or complaints that we are just not European enough. It works. It works brilliantly. We are ultra-European Unionists; the EU is our way of government.
Name three UK national newspapers controlled by Mr Murdoch.
The Times. The Sun. And....?
Name three American national newspapers controlled by Mr Murdoch.
The Wall Street Journal. The New York Post. And....?
He's not nearly as all-powerful as you think. Most media has nothing to do with him, in Britain and America.
In Sweden, we've had this law (in Sweden called Lagen om Elektronisk Kommunikation, LEK, the Law of Electronic Communication) for almost 9 years, more specifically since 25th of July 2003. When it was introduced, neither the government nor the police met the demands set by the law, and they were immediately facetiously reported to the police for it by a number of "concerned citizens", but they weren't charged. After a couple of months they'd implemented the necessary information on their web sites. I haven't heard of anyone having problems with the law (nor of anyone actually following it except the very large web sites), so probably the case law is quite reasonable.
How on God's green Earth can the UK govt. expect to enforce this? Most (or at least many) of the sites UK citizens visit are not based in the UK. Do they expect EVERYONE to adhere to there laws and regulations in this regard? What maroons!
It's true, Europe is the worst country in the world.
Europe is not a country captain dumbass.
Nobody's really sure what they meant when they wrote it. The wording doesn't make sense. Web developers don't have the legal background to understand it, and lawyers don't have the technical background to know what it's about. If my reading of it is correct, it requires an entirely new server architecture because apache cares way too much what's going on. At work, the head of legal couldn't tell me what kind of cookies are covered either. He said to "air on the side of caution" and remove all cookies. I explained to him what that means, and he said "I think it's just for e-commerce sites anyway." I truly hope that they don't try to make an example of us. We're huge, and we do a lot of business in the UK. And we're totally un-fucking-prepared.
This signature intentionally left blank.
At least in the country of Europe we understand sarcasm.
doesn't matter what it is, it's the perfect comeback to the "Europe is a country" line. hilarious.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I guess you suffer from the same thing that makes Americans sometimes seem fucked up and retarded over here: a distorted view presented by the media. I'm not aware of anyone that I know who's proud of "European" things that were done a few countries away. There seems to be some increase in national pride in response to the things people don't like about the EU, but it doesn't come close to reciting a pledge of allegiance in schools.
a little editing here?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/26/cookies-law-changed-implied-consent
My council's CCTV system is most certainly under our control and not under any central control. The police do have appropriate access to it, but with council staff (who are more directly subject to democratic accountability than the police) as gatekeepers.
We could close the system down tomorrow if we wanted to, with no need to consult any "central control". It wouldn't do us any good at the next election, of course, as the punters like the cameras and keep asking for more.
It's not even possible to run a web server that doesn't track you with some kind of analytics.
It is trivial to run a web server without tracking. I click the “Web Sharing” check box in the Sharing preference pane. Done. I am now running a web server without tracking.
Mac OS X uses Apache as its web server. So it must be possible to configure Apache not to do tracking.
Try finding anyone in the UK who gives a damn about prisoner voting rights.
i give a damn, never been to prison, hope never to go, but who knows what laws might get put on the books that make me a criminal for otherwise moral behaviour; if that hasn't happened already!
and as for the dangers, well unless politicians start canvassing on the 'let all the murderers out of jail' ticket. what harm will having murderers voting do to you? whereas say a politico is on a 'marijuana should be legal' kick. then why is the opinion of a convicted druggie on the subject less worthy than say, mine?
i see that you feel that lack of voting is a reasonable punishment for social misbehavior and i can't argue from first principles that you are wrong, i just wanted to point out that i don't see the harm to society in prisoner voting, and i feel that if the punishment is liberty deprivation then we should make that the punishment and not lay other things on top. remember that there are innocent people in prison, they can never be given their liberty back, but they could get to keep their franchisement?
i don't live in america so perhaps i'm wrong but i get the impression that for ordinary folk papers are not news sources, fox tv news and the like are, whereas in the uk it's the other way around. there are national tabloids that politicians like to court to woo the populace with all their attendant bias and agendas, with the uk tv news being far less partial and shrill - though not perfect by any means.
When you say media you ignored Sky and Sky News in particular is not limited to sky subscribers and is fta in various forms. With the digital switch over Murdoch has pretty much everybody in the UK's eyes covered.
Has everyone forgot that the sun on sundays website was registered prior to the closure of the news of the world? Murdoch knew he couldn't save the news of the world after the phone hacking scandal and so stopped the presses for a while.
The sun on sunday is as much the news of the world as Sellafield and Windscale
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
The parent post did specifically say
``Our press is controlled by the same person that controls your Fox "news"''
Hence the reference to newspapers. But even if you include broadcast media, Murdoch only has control of one of the four major over-the-air networks. He also has nothing to do with most cable stations. Really, if it's not got "Fox" in the name, it's not Murdoch. He's a big player, for sure, but his share is relatively small, and there are bigger sharks in the pool. Why does nobody complain about the malign influence of the New York Times, or MSNBC? Well.. I suppose some people do, but they're the wrong sort of people, and their opinions hardly matter.
Meanwhile in the UK, things are even better. Murdoch does not control any major free-to-air channel. Fox News sits next to CNN, Russia Today and News 24, and gets less viewers than any of them. Uncle Rupert is powerless next to the BBC brand name, which is quite simply the first port of call for the vast majority of people.
As to the influence of the tabloids, it's as overstated as the influence of the politicians themselves. Imagine a Britain where Mr Cameron really was in charge, and the opinions of voters actually mattered. The horror, the horror.
* It's reasonably clear (from most guidelines) that session cookies are fine, (because they are essential to functionality). Furthermore, implict consent is given by the act of logging in,
* Long term preference cookies "remember my name and my customisations" are also OK, though it's usually good practice to notfiy the user (the T&C is sufficient for this).
* Analytics cookies (eg Google Analytics) really should be covered by the directive, but basically aren't.
* Evil (cross site advertiser tracking cookies) ought to be exterminated...but these ones can simply be consented into, without really understanding.
It's very generational in the US. The old still read the papers, the middle aged get news from the TV, the young increasingly the Internet. There's hope there - by its nature the Internet is hard to control, and while any given place is likely partial and shrill, they never sing the same song.
The uniformity of narrative (well, 2 narratives) in TV/radio/press in the US is scary sometimes. People feel smart because they believe in Narrative A, and get A reinforced constantly, and only morons listen to Narrative B after all. When of course both are crap.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You're new here. I think what you were supposed to write was "whoosh!"
To be sure that you aren't being tracked, we need to make a database to contain all those who don't want to be tracked.
Just for your convenience of course (and ours as well).
Time for the brits to vote all those mental retards out of office if they can, oh wait they can't.
Thank you for this comment. angelina
you don't need some govt to tell ( companies | you ) what ( they | you ) can or can not do.
NO - you, the user, need to learn how to properly setup and use your browser.
Cookie-Whitelist in Mozilla Firefox setting up a cookie whitelist in Firefox requires no add-ons. It uses default functionality present in Firefox.