This topic was created by Sid .
I am not sure if this a humorous attempt by The Reg to show how silly the law can be.
Anyway, I bite: where is the option to NOT accept cookies and still continue the site?
Mind you I laud your extensive listing of what and how cookies are used. Let me reply in detail too, and I think most privacy minded people will make similar choice as me:
1 id Doubleclick ID ALWAYS BLOCK
2 sc Session Count ALWAYS BLOCK
3 c Visited Channels ALWAYS BLOCK
4 s Account Login OK but WHY a year? why not a session cookie?
5 eucookie EU Cookie Consent Useless if you can't say no
6 voted polls Voted Polls No fan but understand its use
7 v Version ALWAYS BLOCK
7 td Traffic Driver ALWAYS BLOCK
9 cid Campaign ID OK
10 forum_sort Per topic user sort order preference OK
11 sl Lite Account login OK
basically: session cookies ok, any other cookie: RUBBISH
I have changed my cookie settings for this site now.
For years I have deleted all cookies when the browser closes. Not going to change now. So the Reg nag bar comes back every time I log on and visit. Getting pretty pissed off with it I must say. To the point of not bothering with this site any more.
Not just El Reg, same goes for the BBC sites with the stupid big header bar.
For fecks sake, informed consent is one thing, but pissing your visitors off is another. Even is you are making a point.
Perhaps - and I realise that this may be a stupid suggestion - don't allow your readers to be tracked by advertisers in the first place!
IANAL, but aren't essential cookies required for the operation of the site - stuff like the login cookie for example - exempt from this legislation and that consent is only required for cookies that don't fall into this category?
If the problem centres around the tracking cookies then wouldn't the solution involve putting more effort into finding a way of providing the advertising that doesn't require the tracking cookies to start with, thereby removing the need for consent?
This cookie legislation may be appropriate for the likes of Google, Facebook and various remarketing ad networks. But for us? The lawmakers are firing a blunderbuss at all and sundry.
Here is our privacy policy.
We do not let advertisers track users and we never have. We do not allow advertisers to "remarket" our readers i.e. to follow visitors from our site and serve ads elsewhere, based on their time on The Reg. [However, sometimes a reader lands on our site is served a creepily targeted Google ad, because a website they visited previously does allow remarketing.]
I was under the impression that the ICO was trying to do as little as possible where cookie legislation is concerned, from the one year grace period through to them admitting that they would be giving this a very low priority.
These ad networks dump cookies on our PCs. There is no question about that (I counted at least one from DoubleClick, one from adtmt and one from questionmarket from viewing one of your articles). The question remains: if they're not using these for tracking me then why use cookies at all? What purpose do they serve? You don't need to set a cookie to display an advert, and I note that you refer to 'recording' in your own privacy policy. Isn't this just a more cryptic way of referring to tracking?
The link you have in your own privacy policy to the adtmt privacy policy does not seem to be valid. Your own privacy policy seems to rely on vague assurances from 3rd parties that have a clear interest in either breaking those assurances or bending them to breaking point. Of course if you're MediaMind you could just make the privacy policy as vague as possible so that it doesn't mean much (lots of conditional terms there that hides exactly what they are collecting and why).
And as a user of a static IP address my IP *is* PIA. I think that the EU commission has also accepted this generally. MediaMind say in their own policy that this is part of the information they collect and you are letting them do it.
From today's FT:
"Companies that do not comply with new laws on collecting data from online customers will be contacted within weeks by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is beginning a crackdown on infringements.
"The move could affect about 65 per cent of UK companies which, according to estimates by KPMG, are still not notifying visitors to their websites before installing cookies to track online behaviour. This makes them potentially liable for fines of up to £500,000. "
We use cookies to ensure frequency capping of ads and to serve ads according to visits to the site made during the same visit.
We do not track readers. Full stop. We insist that third party networks do not track our readers via our site. Google et al have no interest in breaking the law.
From your policy: 'They do not use information gathered through their cookies for their own use, and they do not collect any personally identifiable information.'
Even if you do not allow remarketing of users Google by definition would have to be storing something personally identifiable in order to know which user I am and for those creepy ads to appear on your site because of previous browsing. Otherwise how would they know what to display?
And I meant PII not PIA in the previous post (damned typos). Any chance of adding the facility to correct posts once they've been published?
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