Little did Netscape’s Lou Montulli know, when he sat down in June 1994 to create a way for a server to keep track of a user’s visits, that his invention would become one of the most despised objects in the Web-based services world.
Cookies. That’s what Montulli created.
They’re what I call a necessary evil. At the time Montulli had his big idea, every visit to a site was like the first; there was no automatic way to note that a visitor had ever dropped by before. Only by forcing the user to log in each time could the site keep track (via an internal database) of what occurred from session to session. Any commercial transaction, for example, would have to be handled from start to finish in one visit. Customers would have to work their way through the same click-trails again and again; it was like visiting a store where the clerks all had amnesia!
EFF RESEARCH: Forget cookies, your browser has fingerprints
Cookies — while not sufficient — made possible the Internet economy we know today. Of course, like any technological tool (telephone, camera, printing press, copier, etc.), cookies can be used for more sleazy purposes. In particular, privacy paranoiacs believe that since some cookies are bad, all should be barred from our desktops. That don’t care that almost all modern browsers (all, as far as I know) allow for fine-grained control of cookie usage. I, for example, routinely accept cookies from major sites I visit regularly while automatically rejecting third-party cookies. It takes all of, oh, 10 seconds to accomplish that.
Yet most users don’t do that. Either they’re very lazy or they’re uneducated. So the European Union wishes to “help” them. Once again the “nanny state” wants to control the Internet — and your identity information.
According to the U.K.’s SC Magazine:
“A new European e-Privacy directive has been announced today and will affect any business tracking users via their cookies online. The new law is an amendment to the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive (from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) and will require businesses and other organisations to obtain consent from visitors to their websites in order to store and retrieve usage information from users’ computers.”
This is a potential disaster for, at least, European retail Web sites but also for any EU site that wishes to allow users to customize the experience they have on those sites. Either a cumbersome pop-up form will have to be filled out before a customer can shop, or a viewer can watch a video, or a person can read news — or just about any other activity — or the sites will have to revert to collecting data each and every time a user is on the site — creating Web sites with amnesia.
As I said, all browsers allow users to exert fine-grained control of cookies. The problem isn’t cookies; the problem is the lack of knowledge of how to manage cookies. But teaching users how to act properly is evidently beyond Brussels’ ken. Remember, this is also the department which oversees sport. And we know how effective the control of football rowdyism is.
Tell your EU reps to tell the department to kindly refrain from fixing that which isn’t broken.
