What's with all this cookie awareness?

[t0p]

Cookies have been used by websites for ages. But just recently a bunch of sites have started telling us about them, for instance having a banner on the home page that says

This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

If you go to this Google results page, you'll see it is a growing phenomenon. So why's this come about? Was there a big Cookies v Privacy court case recently that I don't know about?

[fatality_uk]

Cookies have been used by websites for ages. But just recently a bunch of sites have started telling us about them, for instance having a banner on the home page that says


If you go to this Google results page, you'll see it is a growing phenomenon. So why's this come about? Was there a big Cookies v Privacy court case recently that I don't know about?

The EU has deemed (rightly so imho) that people need to be made aware that sites they visit store data about them.

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisati...e/cookies.aspx

[Dry Lips]

Well, sites that are hosted in the EU now have to comply with the new European cookie directive which went into effect in May.

http://eucookiedirective.com/

[wilee-nilee]

Intrinsically I would say some of us want no cookies saved and a limitation on the ones used when browsing, for personal reasons, I'm in this camp myself.

[Primefalcon]

overactive paranoia tbh.... only data that has already been gathered by other means can be stored in a cookie.... and unlss you want a stateless web... no logins or such.... get over it since thats what most sites use cookies for... remembering who you are so when you login or change site prefs the site can remember that you said to do that....

[fatality_uk]

overactive paranoia tbh.... only data that has already been gathered by other means can be stored in a cookie.... and unlss you want a stateless web... no logins or such.... get over it since thats what most sites use cookies for... remembering who you are so when you login or change site prefs the site can remember that you said to do that....

"overactive paranoia tbh" until you understand what data can and is being used by ad merchants for instance. They can and do track and profile you in real time across multiple domains.

[SeijiSensei]

Unfortunately it's probably impossible to explain to ordinary people the difference between a session cookie, which has a short lifespan and is deleted when the browser is closed, and a persistent cookie which has a long expiration.

I use session cookies on nearly every site I build to manage authentication and track users during a browsing session. I never leave persistent cookies behind because I don't need them and because they represent a privacy issue.

If you use Firefox, I strongly recommend using the Ghostery add-on which lets you block persistent cookies from advertising sites. On most commercial sites I visit, Ghostery will have blocked half-a-dozen or more cookies from sites that track your browsing behavior. Occasionally you'll find a site doesn't work unless a specific cookie is permitted. I find this to be especially true on sites with video, where the video won't play unless the site can set a cookie. You can either disable Ghostery temporarily or use trial-and-error to find the minimal number of cookies required to make the site work then whitelist them.

[Primefalcon]

meh, web sites should switch over to evercookies as session cookies.... apparently a lot of sites such as hulu, aol, spotify and such are already using them anyhow.... good luck deleting those easily.... then again there's always nevercookie

[CharlesA]

meh, web sites should switch over to evercookies as session cookies.... apparently a lot of sites such as hulu, aol, spotify and such are already using them anyhow.... good luck deleting those easily.... then again there's always nevercookie

Those are flash cookies, yeah? I checked Firefox and it has the option to clear flash cookies from the "Clear recent history" dialog box.

[Primefalcon]

Those are flash cookies, yeah? I checked Firefox and it has the option to clear flash cookies from the "Clear recent history" dialog box.

they arn't just flash cookies.... and ever cookies sets normal cookies, flash cookies, cache cookies, local storage cookies amongst others in different locations....

even if just one of these are left, it'll repopulate every single one of them... they are very very hard to get rid of

actually here;s alist of the place it stores id

Standard HTTP cookies
Local Shared Objects (Flash cookies)
Silverlight Isolated Storage
Storing cookies in RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out
Storing cookies in Web history
Storing cookies in HTTP ETags
Storing cookies in Web cache
window.name caching
Internet Explorer userData storage
HTML5 Session Storage
HTML5 Local Storage
HTML5 Global Storage
HTML5 Database Storage via SQLite

The developer is looking to add the following features:

Caching in HTTP Authentication
Using Java to produce a unique key based on NIC information.

btw check out the guys site: http://samy.pl/

it is very cool.....