New cookie laws un-realistic within grace period

The 25th of May marks what could be a major turning point of the internet’s privacy laws. This may change the way websites are developed forever. Since the birth of the internet and its fast pace in growth which has already taken the world by storm, and which still has a long way to go, the enforcement and control of privacy and online content continues to be a major issue. The new cookie laws state that we are to inform users when a website is placing cookies on their computer machines. These cookies are used for profiling your surfing habits as well as saving useful data from websites that you visit frequently, making for a smoother login and website experience in most cases.

The new law officially came into affect today, but so far there are only two countries in Europe that have made an effort to comply with the new directive (Denmark and Estonia). Other countries including the UK have indicated that they are far from reaching any kind of solution to what has been marked as a near impossible logistical and technical task which indicates that there will inevitable have to be a compromise. Companies have been given a year in which to comply to the new laws or face a possible fine, a bizarre figure of exactly $806,000 being the maximum fine as quoted by the BBC, which web site owners could theoretically face… ‘Who came to that random figure!’.

Since technically what the new directive is stating is from what we can tell going to be a mammoth task, which is not only unreasonable to enforce overnight, but the cost and development costs that this would imply would simply be un-economical for most website owners. This will leave the major corporations and leading companies with the most resources, to gain another big step on the online battle to win market share.

Mozilla’s Firefox browser and IE9 have made a concerted effort to integrate a new setting to protect users from services which collect and harvest browser data as well as Google working on integrating so-called ‘Do Not Track’ along with their future browsers, it seems that the average website owner will need to rethink and develop their own methods to try and comply with the new laws as soon as they can.

You can read the BBC article on this at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13541250