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I am currently a webmaster (and I don't know if that's still used either, doesn't feel like it), and this is going to be a huge pain in the arse. The main reason it is a pain is the vagueness of the legislation, nobody has any idea what they can and can't do.

Sure we can follow the ICO and put a pop-up on the site asking to accept cookies or not (which if you select 'not' ironically creates a cookie), but as other people have pointed out that's laughable (for a huge number of reasons) and would push online trade away from uk sites. Easiest option for me would be to shift hosting outside the EU, take the SEO location hit and get back to work as usual (EDIT: it appears I am a little behind on the legislation as last time I read it hosting overseas was a loophole, looks like I need to refresh things).

Alternatively if I could dispense with cookies and shift tracking upstream to a CDN that would also save me the problem and at that point I should be getting even more data such as IP addresses.

Users need to take control of their browsing and privacy, they need to be aware of what they are giving away when they join a site or go online in general. Currently they are clueless and that is what needs to stop, force a prompt for all cookies regardless of country, evens the playing field and make people think for a change (if you're a chrome user "Edit this cookie" is an invaluable plugin for monitoring and removing what each site is placing on your machine).

It's also a bit rich saying that tracking cookies are bad whilst trying to pass a law attempting to track almost all communication:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/04/uk-government-proposes...

discuss

dave1010uk|14 years ago

On the ICO's site (http://www.ico.gov.uk) there is no "don't accept cookies" option. You can only select "accept" or not interact with the form at all. If you don't accept cookies then the form is shown at the top of every page.

wardenclyffe|14 years ago

I stand corrected, sorry about that, originally it did, which was the cause of much amusement for a while. Obviously they fixed it.

read_wharf|14 years ago

"It's also a bit rich saying that tracking cookies are bad whilst trying to pass a law attempting to track almost all communication:"

Governments hate competition.

dlikhten|14 years ago

Don't forget, all that consent given in the TOS is pointless as nobody has time to read all the TOS they need to.

I am in 100% support of this law. Even if it impacts my ability to analyze users.