My friend had a cat he called Cookie
That’s an unusual name for a cat I said
Not really, he replied it’s short for Cooking Fat
As you may be aware, new legislation came in last week designed to protect online privacy of customers by making them aware and giving them a choice, about the amount of information collected about them by websites.
Many websites use things called “cookies” which are small files that are placed on users computers by websites they visit. These are typically used for example, to improve the login experience (by remembering login details) or on e-commerce sites to remember exactly which items you’ve placed in your basket before checking out.
The problem is they can also be used to track users behaviour, such as which pages are visited and it is concerns about the potential misuse of this information that has given rise to the new legislation.
So far so good, but let’s move on to one or two problems. The vast majority of websites you visit are likely to use cookies in one way or another, this one included! But most do so in a completely harmless way, simply remembering preferences or login details and do so to speed and improve your experience of that website. Almost as frequently, website owners track users activity to judge which of the pages in their website are popular, which are unpopular and which visits lead to orders being placed etc. most of this tracking is done completely anonymously (i.e. no personal information about the user is collected) and is therefore considered harmless.
So potentially almost every website out there infringes the new legislation! – but wait at the last minute, well 48 hours before the legislation came into effect to be exact it was changed, to suggest that website owners only needed to get “implied consent” rather than ” explicit consent” which had been the case in the original draft.
Most browsers (the things you use to view the Internet on your computer), have a setting which is either set to “accept cookies” or “do not accept cookies”, so if the user has set his browser up to accept cookies, could this be considered implied consent?
Most of the Web and the world has adopted a “wait-and-see” approach, but the last minute change does seem to have seen commonsense prevail!
You can read the BBC’s article here and the government position here (Information Commissioner’s office) http://www.ico.gov.uk/ - but be warned with this last when you have to accept cookies for that one or it won’t work!
If you have any concerns about the way our website or applications use cookies, please contact us.