Tagged “legal”

An interesting BBC podcast on the history and true nature of the cloud.

We connect to the cloud, think of it as place-less, a digital “elsewhere” for storing and retrieving our data, content and memories. But far from being immaterial, the cloud is a vast, physical network made up of concrete, silicon and steel, of earthbound server farms, subterranean data centres and cables beneath the sea. It is not a publicly owned space or digital 'commons'. It is a multi-billion dollar, private infrastructure dominated by some of the world’s most powerful companies—principally Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The cloud exists within the same geography that we do: a patchwork of national and legal jurisdictions, which determine—most of the time—what it can and cannot do.

The most popular drop-in solution to the EU Cookie Law requirements.

Over the last year I’ve been successfully using Cookie Consent by Osano on a number of commercial websites. Essentially this is a banner which appears at the bottom (or top) of your website and asks the visitor to explicitly give (or decline to give) consent for the cookies your website uses. It’s a great free resource which handles the requisite GDPR requirements (and more) and offers a number of customisation options.

it’s very simple to include and use – you just step through their WYSIWYG generator, include the generated JavaScript-based settings in your site, and point to their CSS and JavaScript libraries. I like self-hosting my own static assets so I integrate the libraries into my code rather than linking to their externally hosted files, but that’s just my personal preference.

Why do we need this?

It’s because In 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, establishing a number of principles governing the collection of personal information. Any company or individual that processes personal information of European Union citizens must comply with the GDPR, regardless of where data is stored or processed.

Cookies often collect information about their users that is not specifically identified with one individual, but if that information, combined with other data, can be used to identify an individual, it becomes “personal information” for the purposes of the GDPR and must be treated as such.

The clearest and most effective way to notify a user in advance of the collection of information using cookies is to provide a web banner or “pop-up” cookie notice that appears automatically when the home page is accessed for the first time, and requires some affirmative action.