From: Thomas Hurst Date: 2002-10-15T19:25:25+09:00 Subject: Re: CGI sessions without cookies? * Stefan Scholl (stefan.scholl@brave.de) wrote: > Thomas Hurst wrote: > > Uhm, if the user has disabled cookies, it's a good bet that they > > would rather not be tracked by you moving the data from the cookies > > to the URL. > > Cookies are permanent per default. No, cookies live for the browser session by default. > We have a different culture and laws regarding privacy in Germany and > the EU. Maybe that's the reason why some people in this newsgroup > don't see the problem here. Cookies are easy to control and manipulate in most browsers. I can choose: 1) To disallow tracking me completely 2) To allow you to track me only until I reopen my browser 3) To allow you to track me only if you are on a trusted list of sites (or not on an untrusted one) 4) To only allow you to track me if your site has a p3p privacy policy I can look at. 5) To disallow other sites you might link to from tracking me, e.g. banner adverts 6) To allow you to track me normally It's also trivial to log and keep an eye on what cookies are being set. With URI-encoded cookies, I have one choice which I can realistically automate: 1) Allow you to track me throughout my entire use of your site. Should I later choose to log in, you can then link my entire usage of your site back to me. I can perhaps edit it manually to thwart you, but this is often easier said than done (e.g. Amazon's URI's) and easy to forget. Now, which do you think are better for privacy? Cookies with exact known specifications which you can ACL and filter fairly arbitarily depending on your privacy needs, or URI-encoded cookies you can't turn off and which a site can easily choose (without telling you) to leak to other sites? -- Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst - freaky@aagh.net - http://www.aagh.net/ - Expect a letter from a friend who will ask a favor of you.