Watchdog "Not Ready" To Probe Cookie Complaints

nk497 writes "The UK data watchdog has admitted it doesn't have any staff investigating cookie consent complaints, more than a year after the law came in via an EU directive. The regulation requires websites to ask before dropping cookies and other tracking devices onto users' computers, and came into law in May 2011. The Information Commissioner's Office gave websites a year's grace period to update their websites, but failed to use that time to get its team together, meaning the 320 reports of sites not in compliance it's already received haven't been investigated at all."

Comments

Dumb laws are dumb.

[VortexCortex]

When you go to a web site that "stores cookies" in your browser, what happens is that a HTTP "Set-Cookie" header is sent to your browser. YOU HAVE THE POWER TO DISABLE COOKIES in your browser. It's not like the remote site can make your browser save the cookie.

The user already has every capability to prevent the remote sites from storing any cookies. Simply DISABLE ALL COOKIES. Then, if you run across a site that has a feature requiring cookies (stateful sessions, like logging in), then and ONLY THEN DO YOU ENABLE COOKIES for that site alone. White list it. Oh your browser doesn't have a white list? YES IT DOES. IE does. FF has the Cookie Monster plugin among other ways, Chrome has -- Fuck Chrome! Chromium Exists. Chrome is closed source and has Google's secret advertising sauce added if you don't like cookies why would you use Chrome?! Google Sells Ads.

Now, being a primordial deep one from time immemorial, I remember an age before cookies existed. I used caller ID, bitrate and handshake timings to log and verify my visitors' identity in the BBS era. Then came the Internet. I used a hash of the user agent, IP address, and other header strings along with URL munging (crazy crap you see after the ? in your address bar) to identify and verify users. Cookies allowed us to stop crapping up every URL on the page, and causing massive link rot... So, you want to make laws about cookies, eh? Well there are levels of tracking we are willing to accept, and we don't even need the damn cookies to do so. Enjoy server side storage of your IP address, browser signatures, and Query Strings cocking up your bullshit European URLs....

Get bent morons. Cookies are good for you, at least YOU can control them. You can't very well control whether or not servers use URL munging....

It's a damn stupid law

[maroberts]

Am I the only one who thinks that these popups which state "we're using cookies" is highly annoying?

Almost everyone apart from your aged grannie knows that you are tracked on sites by use of cookies, so what is the point of this bureaucratic nonsense? It's almost like a secret plot; a small step to making the net unusable.

  If you really want to ban something, block sites from opening 3rd party poker/porn sessions in windows behind your current window, not that such things happen to me of course.....

[/rant]