In odrer to comply with the EU privacy legislation this site has a discreet statement on cookies.
Many websites I visit in my daily life have a nag screen that pops up from time to time. The BBC does for example. Up until now this irritation has appeared regularly and apparently at random. Will it ever stop I wonder?
My browser is configured to accept cookies and then delete them on shutdown. This is a reasonable thing to do, but it is constantly erasing the cookie which says I have read the cookie nag screen. Thus, sometime later the nag pops up again, and again … and again. It's possible to have no restrictions on cookies at all, but that's not what I want and instead of being free to choose I'm being pressured into accepting cookies without restriction. This is exactly the opposite of what the rules were set up for, I believe.
What if a visitor doesn't want to have cookies set at all? Well, in order for the sites visited to remember this requirement, a cookie has to be left! This completely circumvents the idea of visitor choice over privacy and cookies.
Another issue arises if I embed a video from YouTube (for example) in my website. Am I suddenly responsible for their cookies? What cookies might they be? Do they, in turn, allow third party cookies about which I know nothing. Some webmasters attempt to pin this jelly to the wall by passing on the current policy of the embedded sites. What if the policy changes? What if there are third party cookies as well? Any of those policies could change at a moment's notice so the webmaster has to read and constantly re-publish them, an admistrative nightmare.
Result - a mess!
