Are you sick of being asked about cookies?

catwoman73 wrote: »

What I find particularly annoying is the adverts that litter sites that relate to your recent browsing history. Causes difficulties if you share a computer with a partner and have just been shopping for their christmas present!

Just make sure that after you have been looking at perfume/jewellery/posh chocolates on websites that you look at other sites to throw her off the scent.
You can even tease her a little by looking at household appliances/damart (old person clothing)/Ann summers/etc, that way she will be really relieved Christmas day when it's anything remotely nice after she's been dreading what you are going to buy her for the last month

1) Cookies allow the internet to work. Without a 'session cookie' or passing an ugly hash string around in the url between pages it would be impossible for your internet banking, grocery shopping or Facebook stalking to work. The websites simply would not know it was still you when you click between pages. The internet is 'stateless'.

Warning, this one is geeky - http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/stateless

2) "For about a year, the EU Cookie Directive's forced UK websites to ask if you’re willing to accept cookies (files that track what you’ve done) on your computer." - WRONG

The 'law' does not state that and it does not force anyone to do anything. Read up on it here:

http://www.ico.org.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies

3) Cookies are actually just short strings of text. They can't do anything harmful to your computer. They can however allow advertisers and other tracking to happen to you. Banning or demonising cookies is not the way to resolve it. The Do Not Track proposals and protocol are. You can read more about them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track


I build websites. We don't ever pop up a 'are you happy for us to set cookies on your computer?' box on a page or spit a popup in our visitors' faces. We do however offer a link to find which cookies we set and why we set them.

Don't believe everything you read. It's not really as scary as people would like you to believe.

ministe2003 wrote: »

Cookies are an essential part of making the internet work. The popups only scare people who don't know what cookies are or what function they perform, and will often cause them to say NO because they assume they're dangerous.

There's far worse things on the web that we should be protected from, cookies aren't one of them.

Here here what gets me is people who think cookies can spread viruses and fry your motherboard lol but happily click links and share links on facebook without another thought about it.

I've never been asked if I'm willing to accept cookies. It wouldn't matter anyway, they all disappear when I close the browser (unless I've whitelisted a particular site, such as my bank).