It’s just over two weeks until controversial European privacy laws on cookies come into effect in the UK. But, as we covered back in March, the government still haven’t given any solid advice.
We’ve been fairly critical of the EU’s online privacy policies before now, and this development is no different.
While cookies are used to streamline a user’s online experience, speed up browsing, and provide webmasters with important data (like how many of you have read this article), the EU guidelines seem to think that they’re used to “[create] detailed profiles of an individual’s browsing activity”. Despite the fact that this isn’t really the case, the government have issued a PDF explaining the new regulations in a roundabout way.
As this PDF isn’t particularly clear with its advice beyond “you need to do something, because this law exists”, spokespeople from the Information Commissioner’s Office have admitted that their advice doesn’t offer all the answers.
All they’ve said so far is that you need to “examine your cookies” and decide whether they require “informed consent”. If you think consent is needed, they’re recommending popups and mandatory Terms and Conditions which must be shown before content is accessed.
Because as we all know, there’s nothing internet users love more than popups and legalese.
The FirstFound Blog will let you know if any solid guidelines are released, and provide any advice we can.
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Far as I can tell, the document doesn’t cover HTML5 storage methods, making the legislation out of date before it’s even brought into effect, and give people an enormous “loophole” to exploit.