EU Cookie Law

[kalniel]

I'm giggling at The Register's implementation of this:

The Register uses cookies. Some may have been set already. Read about managing our cookies.

Please click the button to accept our cookies. If you continue to use the site, we'll assume you're happy to accept the cookies anyway.

And there's a button that says 'I'm fine with this'

[oolon]

I had to dispair when I heard this on the TV, the newscaster called them programs, then it was down hill from there! Web is stateless and re-entrant in its nature. If people want to interact with web sites, the need some way to record what they are doing and what they have done, cookies provide that whats the big deal! I agree it should be browsers that deal with the clean up, move away from the side, it wipes the cookes, you join it again your get a fresh new one.

Anyone remember when all your information was in the URL, I am glad those days are over.

[scaryjim]

On one of my computers I have IE set to prompt for all third party cookies. I'm repeatedly shocked and disgusted by the number of cookies generated from outside the site I'm visiting that it wants to store on my PC - it's fairly easy to tell that most of them are advertising trackers, and I will deny pretty much any cookie that I'm not sure about the provenance of. It's a pain in the rear, frankly - on a bad website I'll have to respond to tens of dialogue boxes - but it's a useful reminder to myself of just how pervasive the issue is, and just how much behavioural tracking I'm subject to on an average day's web browsing. I can understand how a mass of political pressure could build up for action to be taken.

[jimbouk]

People got peeved with pop-up adverts, browser started to block them. Flash adverts become far too large/cpu intensive, adblock becomes very popular and browser start to have click to run on by default. Third party/tracking cookies come into mainstream media and people start to worry about them, the problem with this one is that I don't see Google having them switched off by default on Chrome!

Personally I'm session only (with exceptions) for local cookies, and block third party cookies, if this breaks a site then I go elsewhere.

[Noxvayl]

I use Ghostery for third party cookies, some site have more than 10 different cookies/bugs that it blocks for me and the site works fine without them... so annoying.

Thankfully we have a range of good apps to make it easy for us to block tracking cookies.