The cookie law that nobody asked for

The European Union’s new cookie law, which finally came into force on Saturday 26th May, is a nuisance that almost no one on the internet asked for.

If you ventured onto the web on Friday you’ll have noticed alerts, pop-ups and pop-ins and all manner of different styles of warnings to tell you that by using this website you consent to accepting cookies from that website.

Cookies, for those who don’t know, are small data files stored in the memory of your browser that tells a website about a user’s behaviour. They’re extremely useful for website owners as they enable the site to remember a user that has previously visited their site. This means you don’t have to type in all your login details every time you load up Facebook, for instance, or that the BBC website remembers the postcode you looked up to find out the weather last week.

However, advertisers started to get savvy to the power of cookies and websites like Play and Amazon would remember the products you were looking at meaning they could put similar products in front of you when you’re browsing another website.

The European Union passed the law that required user’s consent to store data about them way back in 2003. Governments had until 25 May 2011 to implement the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) into their own laws. The Information Commissioner’s Office then gave UK websites a further year in order to bring themselves into compliance.

Unsurprisingly however, despite such a large amount of time to get in line, websites have left it to the last minute to implement their solutions, in the main to prevent putting users off by scaring them with warnings over stored personal data.

The warnings you are likely to see on most sites will echo those of the BBC in highlighting the positive aspects of cookies.

Their warning reads, “We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.”

If you dig a bit deeper they define their use of cookies under three categories: strictly necessary cookies, functionality cookies and performance cookies. The first of these underlines the importance of these little files and how website owners have become almost completely reliant on this information in order to provide online services.

They say, “Some cookies are strictly necessary in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features. Without these cookies, we will not be able to determine the number of unique users of the site or provide certain features, such as automatic sign in to the BBC services.”

And this is the key to the whole debate over these cookies. They are essential for people like me who would like to know how many people have read my articles (thanks if you made it this far). We are unable to work out all sorts of things from our analytics packages without them, and if we can’t work out how people are using our websites then we can’t make them better.

In the last week I’ve been irritated beyond words by all of the alerts that have been appearing on the websites I use. And it doesn’t just happen once, either. Many people, like me, use more than one browser at work, and many more still use another computer at home. In the last week I’ve had to say ‘OK’ to cookies on the BBC website on no less than five occasions. This might sound like I’m taking a small thing like this to heart, but it’s the frequency and the widespread nature across every website of these warnings that starts to grate.

And the really annoying thing is that next to no one even asked for this law. The use of cookies has never been something that has had privacy campaigners frothing at the mouth, unlike any number of other serious (regulation-backed) encroachments on civil liberties and privacy.

A survey carried out by PwC on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport revealed a surprising lack of awareness of the role of cookies, and the management of cookies.

PwC found that even though an overwhelming number of respondents were internet savvy only 13% said they understood how they fully worked, and 37% did not know how to manage cookies on their computer.

This raises the question then of ‘just because no one asked for the law, does that mean we shouldn’t implement it?’

Admittedly, it’s not the general public’s fault that they are unaware of cookies, and how can they campaign for tighter control of something they don’t fully understand. This is arguably why lawmakers intervened to stop the continuing expoloitation of this data by advertisers of people who weren’t aware they were being exploited.

For me however, this is just a sad indictment of the ignorance of many of us when it comes to the technology-driven world we live in. We embrace technology, but we don’t embrace the knowledge of how it works.

Gone are the days of kids discovering programming on the ZX Spectrum or BBC Micro. I applaud the latest government’s plans to invest in the small Raspberry-pi computer, a cheap Linux-based system that is designed to help schoolchildren learn programming.

What we should really be doing is educating people about cookies, and other web technologies, not enforcing regulation on website owners that risks European websites going backwards in their capabilities.

There will be an inevitably large number of people who choose to reject cookies over fears of privacy with this ill-thought out legislation, and those people’s experiences of the rich and immersive web we have all become accustomed to, will be severely damaged.

The digital future that David Cameron and his government have so eagerly backed could be in jeopardy over a security and privacy law that nobody wanted.

Find out more about the use and rules of cookies here.

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