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Privacy The Internet United Kingdom Your Rights Online

BBC Site Uses Cookies To Inform Visitors of Anti-Cookie Law 98

Andy Smith writes "As of 26 May 2011 web sites in the UK must get a user's permission to set cookies. If you go to the BBC's commercial TV listings site Radio Times you'll see a message telling you about the new law. Go to the site again, though, and you don't see the message. How does the site know you've already seen it? By setting a cookie of course! It doesn't ask for permission."
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BBC Site Uses Cookies To Inform Visitors of Anti-Cookie Law

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  • by ammorais ( 1585589 ) on Saturday May 28, 2011 @11:25AM (#36273464)

    There's a lot of people on the Internet - billions, literally. The vast majority of them are not technically inclined; most have no idea how the Internet works or what cookies actually are.

    And sometimes, you actually want cookies. For example, on a news site such as the BBC, you may want to be able to log in and post a comment... and then log out again and not have the site continue tracking you. How do you do that? Short of constantly disabling and re-enabling cookies on a per-site basis, there's no way. Expecting users to do that is idiotic and only shows that a serious disconnect from reality on your part.

    Did you know you can still track people you without cookies? You can use a combination of user-agent/IP/browser/language to track you with considerable accuracy.
    So your solution for is to ask people that don't know/want to know what are cookies, if they want cookies? How kind of question box you suggest?
    Something like this perhaps?


    Do you accept cookies? If you press YES this site will work
    properlly, and we can track you if we want to.
    If you press NO this site won't work properly, but we can't
    track you trough cookies. We can still track you by other means
    if we want to but not with cookies!

    | YES | | NO |

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