So once more in ASCII
http://webmedia.company.ja.net/edlabblogs/regulatory-developments/2011/05/31/cookies-are-some-easier-than-others/

It would probably be a mistake for almost anyone to do anything relating to third-party cookies until Google actually make a statement about the effect this legislation will have on Google Analytics. I think only two EU countries have implemented the full Directive, so it would be interesting to see what they’ve done with these kind of tracking services.

It’s a very long time since I was involved in the nuts and bolts of web servers (P3P is still a promising new technology, as far as I remember!), but feel free to get in touch if it would be useful to compare notes.

Andrew

We subsequently learnt that WCAG simply documented a set of technical guidelines – and that these guidelines were flawed an not universally applicable. In addition we discovered that the emphasis of the accessibility of the digital resource was misplaced – various guidelines could not be implemented if non-UAAG browsers were used. We needed a more realistic approach – and we have seen that in last year’s release of BS8878.

I think we need to avoid repeating mistakes made in the past. Let’s look at what realistic approaches may be deemed appropriate (and the Government has hinted that this is an approach it favours). And also lets explore which approaches can be taken beyond the Web site – such as providing user education, encouraging use of browsers which support privacy standards and providing policy statements in machine-readable formats.

Today we’re publishing an updated list of the main cookies in use across BBC Online and what each is used for. It also tells you how you can control cookies by setting your computer, mobile or other device to notify you when a cookie is issued, or to opt out of cookies altogether.

This advice is akin to accessibility instructions found on many sites e.g. change text size by …

It’ll be interesting to see how this area develops

Martin

One of the things that the legislation is trying to address is that there are different uses for cookies – some of which reveal more personal information than others. By contrast, current browsers allow only one type of automatic filtering: for third-party cookies, which is fairly crude and can be gotten around by websites proxying cookies for third-parties anyway). The only alternative is an “ask me” option, where the user has to make a decision about each and every cookie via a not-very-informative dialog box which interrupts the viewing of the page and soon gets annoying.

So it does kind of make sense for websites to provide a little more information about how the cookies will be used. Typically this has been done via privacy policies – but no-one reads those. The alternative suggested by the ICO is for a bunch of text which the user should read and agree to before a cookie is set. This is the most comprehensive – but still not the greatest experience (no-one wants to have to read that much before using basic webpages).

Mozilla have started to explore how to codify different uses of private data via a set of icons: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/privacy-icons/ – but that’s still work in progress.

Alternatively, perhaps there should just be some reasonable set of rules about how data should and shouldn’t be used (eg no sharing with third parties, max retention limit, etc) – and then we wouldn’t need to ask the user at all. That would, however, cause a lot of trouble for the online advertising industry.

Frankie