Now the cookie rules have been in force for so long that many of us have moved on to deal with more pressing issues, I’ve been asking myself what the fuss was really all about.
There have been benefits. New careers have been forged in
the compliance industry, and webmasters are (probably) more aware of what “their”
websites do than before. Compliance
professionals have developed a new vocabulary of terms which have been posted
on the pages of websites that are accessible by those few, yes those happy
few, users who click on the links to learn more about cookies.
The more frequently I click on these links, the more
frequently I smile. I read down long lists of cookies, carefully explained and categorised,
and I think to myself ‘surely I can’t be the only person not to understand much
about this stuff.’ If ever we have found a way of not engaging with users, then
surely this is it.
But then again, I don’t remember any specific campaigns
mounted by the privacy brigade demanding better transparency about cookies at
the time the e-Privacy Directive introduced the new rules, nor do I recall
reading any letters from customers of the companies I used to work for
mentioning that they wanted to have the right to opt out of certain types of
cookies. Yes, people wanted the right to object to personalised advertising, but
I can’t think of a single letter from a customer that ever mentioned cookies.
Moving on to the present, however, and thanks to the way we
lead out current lives, what we have is a situation where, thanks to the efforts
of the privacy lobby and some of the regulators, people are much better
informed about the electronic trails that they leave.
But has this changed user behaviours? Or user preferences?
Have many people taken advantage of their ability to obliterate
some of these electronic trails by objecting to certain types of cookies?
I’m really looking forward to seeing evidence that many
people have.
What I do see are renewed efforts buy the regulators to
encourage greater transparency – particularly in the mobile arena, where the
focus is now shifting to mobile application developers. Yes, these developers
need to become far more transparent about what they do with the data that is hoovered
up. But, I don’t think this will necessarily damage their business models.
The point, after all, is simply to explain what is being
done with the data that is being obtained. In larger organisations, yes this
will be a challenge – a challenge of information accountability. Many more organisations
seem to have an information security officer than they have someone accountable
for the information that actually populates these databases. The challenge, therefore,
is to understand just who is accountable for the information that is being
processed, so that they can be accountable for the cookie explanation.
I don’t think that these explanations, once published, will
necessarily cause users to object to what is being done. So I don’t think they
have much to fear.
The only thing for businesses to fear is not making these
explanations available in the first place.
To my mind, the greatest thing to have emerged from the great cookie saga has been to highlight the role of effective information governance in an organisation.
And it’s been highlighted, I think, by pointing out how hard
it is to find it within so many organisations.
.
Posts
