Thursday, 26 May 2011

To Make Matters Worse.

“You should analyse which cookies are strictly necessary and might not need consent. You might also use this as an opportunity to ‘clean up’ your webpages and stop using any cookies that are unnecessary or which have been superseded as your site has evolved.” [pdf]

Upshot: Strictly necessary cookies don’t require explicit user consent.

Which means, the EU e-Privacy Directive simply reduces the overall number of cookies dropped by websites. Unless there are suddenly teams of EU Auditors inspecting the business logic at every company around the world – it’s hard to imagine less tracking, less remarketing, less of what this was directive trying to minimize, going on.

It’s easy to imagine the tracking problem increasing and the remarketing efforts increasing and code the captures the data getting further buried into the business logic. All while, a smaller number of analytics companies with their ‘strictly necessary’ cookies grow even larger and are able to better profile/target individuals.

Friday, 27 January 2006

Public Information Shouldn’t Require a Subpeona

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately.

I consider all my web searches, this post – and generally anything that’s not email or an instant messsage – public.

Now, I’m cool with 1 million random results from the index being handed over to the government under one single condition – anyone, anyone at all, a PhD candidate, a 6th grader, a homeless political candidate – request and receive the same information.

Yes. In the same way I feel all the security cameras on Nicollet Avenue should be accessible via a web browser by the general public – any of you should be able to request the same information. Outside of quantity – I’m not sure how this is different than Google’s Zeitgeist.

Actually, the fact we don’t have easy access to this information seems like a public disservice.