New EU Net Rules Set To Make Cookies Crumble

NickstaDB writes "From the BBC article: 'From 25 May, European laws dictate that "explicit consent" must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via text files called "cookies." These files are widely used to help users navigate faster around sites they visit regularly. Businesses are being urged to sort out how they get consent so they can keep on using cookies.'"

Re:Thanks EU

[mrcaseyj]

IPv6 will give almost everybody practically static addresses, the ultimate undeleteable cookie. So the EU regulation will be futile very soon.

Re:Thanks EU

[Narcocide]

You got modded flamebait but in reality you've understated the situation quite significantly. When the feds come to bust a private host for something they usually take everything in the room that is even plugged into the same power line and all the networking hardware out to the wall, then they leave it up to the owners of the hardware to litigate for return of their property.

Ghostery for FF

[b4nd0ler0]

As for third party cookies: I use Ghostery on Firefox and it works pretty well and it's pretty unobtrusive once configured. It's amazing to see how many of these cookies are used and abused. Some sites have literally dozens of them. (./ has two: Google analytics and Addthis). FB and Twitter are major culprits, they have no business tracking me when I'm visiting some other site, I'm not one of their users and I don't give a sh`t about what they do. I support this legislation, we just don't know how much user data these companies are gathering and for what use so it's basically saying that you cannot track people that doesn't want to be tracked.

Re:Car anology

[Malc]

Hmmm, bad car analogy. As an owner and driver, I already have control over that. Perhaps it would be more like manufacturers putting a feature or governor in your car that makes it drive past some advertising slowly, without your permission... in which in my case I'd want the EU to regulate, just like I'm happy to see them doing something about abusive companies trying to track me for their benefit rather than mine.

Re:EU = make things harder

[cynicist]

There is no free market in the US. There are lots of regulations and government intervention here, they just happen to be on behalf of corporations rather than individual citizens. One of the reasons you can choose multiple ISP's and we cannot is due to monopoly agreements granted to ISP's in the US. You have more favorable regulation in the EU to be sure, but don't pretend the problems in the US have anything to do with a lack of government involvement...

Re:Oh so important anti-virus scanners!

[wvmarle]

Well I agree with you that a cookie may not physically harm you; and that they are very useful tools for web site programming.

Yet the primary problem with cookies is the third-party cookies that ad networks place on your computer. So this ad network can track which web sites you visit. This has no use for you as end user; it only servers to give the ad network more information about you. They can see you visit slashdot, they can see you visit certain lolcat related sites, they see you visit amazon, they follow you whenever you hit a web site where their ads (and cookies) are served. And that is the problem they most likely want to tackle as that is where privacy is an issue.