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UK.gov to miss another deadline on privacy

Incoming cookie rules won't be enforced

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The UK government will not have its regulatory house in order by 25 May when a new EU law on cookies come into force.

At the same time, the Information Commissioner's Office is warning businesses to be ready for the changes, even though the government's own guidelines won't be published until after that date.

Under the European Privacy and Electronic Communications directive, Blighty-based businesses and other organisations running websites that track their users' cookies will be required by law to obtain "explicit consent" from visitors to their sites.

"The directive will come into force in less than two months' time and businesses and organisations running websites in the UK must wake up to the fact that this is happening," said Information Commissioner Christopher Graham.

He said the law would present "positive benefits" to individuals, but added that the ICO was concerned that it could also "cause an unnecessary burden on UK businesses".

Upon publication of the new regulations, Graham said a huge job of educating and guiding businesses and organisations would get underway.

The ICO is tasked with steering the regulation, while the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is responsible for implementing the new measures in the UK.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey admitted that "work will not be complete by the implementation deadline".

Furthermore, the ICO won't "take enforcement action in the short term" against those UK outfits that fail to immediately adhere to the regulation.

"The government is clear that it will take time for meaningful solutions to be developed, evaluated and rolled out," said Vaizey. ®

What you need to know about cloud backup

cookies?

really?

so you want to censor the internet and log all of our personal correspondence in a government stalkabase, but you CARE about our privacy so you are going to restrict the use of cookies? Wow. *slow clap*.

Maybe stop this fear mongering about cookies (because that's what it is) and actually EXPLAIN what they are and what they do. Not just spew nonsense like "tracky advert behavioral website file linky download" that only serves to make people confused and frightened. THEN you can work on restricting their use (note: I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing)

Shit a brick.

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But....

How do we track users that have selected "no" so that we don't have to keep asking them on every page? Can we store it in the session... or do session cookies still count as cookies? In which case we'll have to just pass the session id along in the url... nice and secure :D

Paris, because she always gives permission to access her cookies.

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Anonymous Coward

Yeah, right.

"the ICO was concerned that it could also 'cause an unnecessary burden on UK businesses' "

Woudn't it be a darn sight more accurate to say "We're totally incompetent to even think of dealing with this - just look at the complete balls-up we started with our never-ending inaction over UK ISPS who routinely intercept people's browsing for commercial gain."

Fuckwits, to a man.

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