Technorama

An omnibus of tech posts by a Futurologist on software development primarily.

Sunday, 1 April 2007

 

Cookie privacy solution

Apple UK's website asks visitors if they are happy to have a tracking cookie set, and if they don't opt-into that agreement they set a "nocookie" flag. VW's site has a similar privacy approach, they don't offer it by default though.

"If you do not wish to receive this cookie, click here. This will delete the webabacus_id cookie and instead place another cookie on your machine, called nocookie, which will prevent you being served any further personalised cookies by this site."

I'd like to see more companies take a modern approach like Apple has.

there are a few workarounds for the privacy incursion of cookies we can use in browsers like Firefox:
  1. Set cookies to "ask every time", fine-grained control, which gives a popup question the first (or each) time a site tries to set or read a cookie.
  2. Set cookies to last "until I close Firefox", so each time you start with a clean configuration.
  3. Cookie Exceptions allows a user to block *.doubleclick.net permanently, but they still have to enter these manually. Firefox really needs to be supplied with these as default, and have an extension check and update the list each week.
  4. Rather than save login details in a cookie on systems like eBay and GMail, just use Firefox's "Remember passwords" option when it pops up. That way when you next visit eBay it fills in the login form. (I use this approach combined with no.2)

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