Google turns cookie monster on AdSense, DoubleClick clients Google has warned its AdSense and DoubleClick customers to sort out their cookie tracking policies before the European Commission gets pissy with them. In a blog post published on Monday (July 27) by Jason Woloz, the Chocolate Factory’s security and privacy programme manager for display and video ads, the search monster said …
No, but you probably will care if Google decides they're not going to take the (potential) risk of serving ads on your site. If they decide the site isn't compliant with their policies, that's the logical outcome - though somehow I doubt Google are going to bother auditing in order to deliberately cut off some (albeit small) part of their revenue stream.
It's much more likely that they've sent out the notification so they can tell the commission they've pointed it out to publishers, and the responsibility therefore rests with the individual publishers.
Google will simply cut you off if you don't apply. The cookie code is served as part of their ads, so it's them that are liable.
I suspect that the EU have pointed this out to them, and Google generally take a precautionary approach when dealing with publishers. It's cheaper.
I was contentiously objecting because it is an absurd statement of the standard browser functionality, and negatively impacts on user experience, and for small content sites, the cost of determining whether a user is in Europe or not is prohibitive. I guess I'll have to annoy my users with a stupid paranoia inducing 'consent' form now, and find someway to block them that doesn't involve cookies if they decline.
Stupid law, passed by idiots bent on making EU citizens second class citizens of the net.
That's what they really need to fix.
Why? You have some god-given right to use their website? As long as you're given a clear and full description of the cookies they use and how they use them then I can't see the problem with them saying "don't use our website if having read this explanation it's likely to cause you any anxiety or nightmares".
Hey, neat idea! Do you mind if I steal and adapt it as "Hey, we're going to pollute the heck out of this planet - if you don't agree please don't use it: find a different one!"...?
That's a terrible analogy. A website setting cookies is equivalent to pouring oil into the sea and filling the atmosphere with carbon and methane? Really?
He's right, a website can set whatever they want, so long as they give you (the consumer/reader) the information required to decide whether you're willing to accept those terms. I agree the "we set x cookies, tough shit" style banners aren't quite in the spirit of the law, but then a banner that says "we set x cookies -> accept, deny" would be no different if the result of clicking "deny" was that you get redirected off the site - it'd be closer to the spirit of the law though.
There are altogether too many 3rd party services being called from pages nowadays IMO, but it's not just the cookies that are the issue, it's the overall behaviour of those parties. The argument should be about the behaviour and not a specific mechanism, if advertisers switched to using Local Storage instead of cookies, they'd bypass the law and still be capable of the same thing....
You have some god-given right to use their website?
Not at all, but the the current message is simply a pointless waste of screen estate. I know of no large website that doesn't use cookies. It's just politicians doing something useless so they can be seen to be doing something, with our money.
The trouble with Google is that their business model - pushing targeted ads where targeting is based on personal profiling without consent - is at odds with privacy and hence any decent data protection laws. What they are trying to do here is circumvent the EU law's spirit with an interpretation of its letter such that they'd be allowed to carry on as they were, when the only real solution would be dropping the offending business model based on the (non-existent) US law.
As the owner of a very small website that just about covers its costs by running Google adverts, I'm not at all impressed.
_I_ don't set any cookies at all - no tracking etc. - but Google does, as part of showing adverts.Personally I'd rather turn off their cookies, even if it cost me a little money, but instead I'm being told that unless I put up a message on my site I may be chased by both Google and by the EU
But neither side will tell me what that message needs to say...
"But neither side will tell me what that message needs to say..."
Something along the lines of.
"This website uses cookies so that the adverts (and it's Google that decides what they are not me) that appear while you are reading it should be relevant to you. That means that I get paid more for including those ads, which means I can afford to let you read this stuff for free.
If you are not happy with targeted ads, then you are welcome to go and look at other websites, perhaps they've got what you want. I'd like to make an exception - I'm certain you're a nice person - but website hosting costs money."
Most websites that are useful these days seem to depend on being able to set cookies - deliberately one assumes..
That's the result of all this cookie legislation. Instead of 'we use stealth cookies that you can disable if you are smart' its now 'we have made cookies mandatory for the operation of this site, and if you don't want to let us set them, you cannot use our site'.
Among other things, cookies are the normal way of doing session tracking for sites that require logins, so you don't have to log in on every page. There are other ways to do it (like passing the session key as a parameter in the URL) but they're uglier and sometimes less secure.
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As a site must obtain a user's consent before doubleclick.com or google.com cookies are placed or used (to at last comply with the 2009 e-privacy directive), how is that consent signalled to Google so the cookies or other tracking techniques are not used?
Surely the only way to do this reliably and transparently is to use the W3C recommended DNT (Do Not Track) signal.
Designed to communicate a user's choice not to be tracked, this recommendation also describes the reciprocal signal DNT:0, set via server placed JavaScript, in order to communicate a user's "freely given, specific, and informed" consent to be tracked across multiple domains, i.e. from a first-party site to its embedded third-parties..
The agreed wording for the definition of "tracking", after much argument and deliberation between all parties including representatives of the on-line advertising industry and Silicon Valley companies is:
"Tracking is the collection of data regarding a particular user's activity across multiple distinct contexts and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred. A context is a set of resources that are controlled by the same party or jointly controlled by a set of parties."
Instead of leaving the mess for its AdSense customers to deal with, when will Google finally agree to respect the Do Not Track signal?
If they support DNT, given that some browsers make it the default, they'd lose a lot of revenue being unable to identify users. They will never support DNT. The most they'll do is support something that requires a lot of work for users to enable, and can't be done via default, so few will do it.
On my site, you have the banner to accept or decline with a link to what we use them for (stat's mainly.
If you accept, you get the option to turn it of again if you want.
If you decline 90% of the site works fine, some bits don't work, but nothing major.
Unlike The Reg that sets them if you want them or not and puts in a banner saying, we've set them so tough shit.
There is a "good" way and a bad"way. Take your choice.
The key new requirement is you must get consent before the first ad sets a cookie - so that's either a blocking popup, or no Google (or similar) ads on the first page, for EU visitors.
I looked at my stats. For a general-purpose site in English, I get 12% of revenue from the EU (half of that is UK), and it's falling. India and the rest of Asia is where the growth is (almost entirely mobile as well). (The US is down to 25% of revenue and falling).
So I'm going to check the country of the user when they arrive. If they're from the EU, don't serve them any Google Adsense (or similar cookie-setting) ads. There are some alternatives ads (especially for the UK). Yes, I'll take a hit on income, but as there will be some income from the alternate ads it'll be below 10%, and a better user experience.
The only other thing that sets cookies is Google Analytics, so it's time to remove that as well.
End result: no need for a cookie popup or banner, a faster site for some users, and a gradual move away from relying on cookie-setting ads (which we'll all have to do in the next few years anyway, it's time to start).
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