The EU Cookie Directive

The recent legislation means that businesses and other organizations now need to get consent from visitors to their websites in order to store and retrieve
information using Cookies.

Any website found guilty of using Cookies without a visitor’s consent could face a
fine of up to £500,000 ($750,000). This the maximum penalty set by the UK. Other
countries will set their own maximum penalties.


Since most websites are designed to use Cookies, the majority of people will be
happy to give their consent as they are used to the benefits that Cookies provide.
Not providing consent would result in severely restricted functionality say, when
using a regular online shopping or financial site.

What will you do to become compliant?

 

http://www.okcookie.org (assume this is your site) Never loaded was just really slow. I'm sure you know about the law, so share more details and I would love to read the actual text of the law.

I did find this site that at least loaded and found some info:

http://www.cookielaw.org/optanon.aspx

Interesting because I have seen little about this in the news.

 

The cookie law is EU based law, but law makers in the USA are looking to implement similar laws, but also trust issues between visitors and sites are starting to become more important As users increasingly become aware of the new Cookie Laws, they will expect to see an app like OKcookie on a website protecting their privacy.

 

The EU Cookie Directive (Directive 2009/136/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council) is an amendment of the Directive 2002/58/EC, which concerns the protection of data and privacy on the web. The most important paragraph in the Directive 2009/136/EC, mentioning the regulations regarding cookies you will find below:

“Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information, in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia, about the purposes of the processing. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.;”.

above copied from: http://eucookiedirective.com/

 

this is a European cookie law but us law markers are expected to follow soon., but there are trust implications world wide As web surfers increasingly become aware of the new Cookie Laws they are starting to expect a choice with who and how there data is used

 

I Use GHOSTERY to see and block nearly every cookie from my computer. The best part is seeing how many and which ones each site tries to load. My load times have become much faster as a result of blocking sites trying to connect to facebook and twitter and load 5 different analytics programs.

On DP for example, I block:

Doubleclick
Facebook Connect
Google +1
Google Analytics
Facebook Button

I allow:

Google Adsense

http://www.ghostery.com/

The best part is even after you accept cookies using one of these new EU cookie compliance scripts, the cookies still get blocked if you wanted to block them with Ghostery. So I set to accept all on OKcookie, but then when the page loads, I see that Ghostery went ahead and blocked Google Analytics as I have set it to.

 

Here's a Mac version http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/31018/safari-cookies.

An insane directive. Most websites (membership sites, for example) rely absolutely on cookies. And anyway, it's not the WEBSITE that is putting the cookie on someone's machine, it's the BROWSER. Like to see THAT tested in court...

 

Ghostery works on mac and on Safari. I am on a mac, not Safari though.

Browser is getting the code from the website, not something it is loading on its own volition. That argument would be like saying the browser is doing the publishing and thus liable for everything on every website. It just doesn't get you anywhere, legally. The one who controls what cookies and what content load on what page is the website owner, not the browser.

 

Not sure I agree with that, in fact its one of the main reasons I use a Mac, to avoid drive by downloads, viruses etc.

There are a bunch of browsers that don't show anything but text, for example, and don't drop cookies either. All browsers I'm aware of allow you to decline cookies from the preference settings. So if a 'website' puts a cookie on your computer, it's basically down to *you* and the browser.

After all, I could create a browser that deleted your entire hard disk whenever it came across a webpage that contained the word 'Laceygirl'. Anyone visiting DP using the browser would pretty much instantly have their hard disk erased. Who would be to blame? DP? Laceygirl? Me, as the browser author? I would of course have a setting that stopped it doing this, and would warn anyone using the browser for the first time what it did, but would that absolve me? It wouldn't stop half the user population losing their disks... Just because a webpage requests that a browser does something doesn't mean the browser has to do it. Just like with pop ups.

Spurious example, I know, but the reality is that cookies are needed because of the technical limitations of the original HTML definition. Stateless systems are never fun to programme, and cookies were simply a fudge to try and provide some kind of mechanism to deal with the requirements of, for example, passwords and logins.

 

I'll stick with my previous position.