DCMS Secretary Oliver Dowden tells The Telegraph this morning that he plans to do away with “endless” cookie banners, the pop-up notices that plague our online browsing to tell us what is patently obvious, that websites store personal information about you. Some nerds will wet the bed at this news. Guido set this as a test of whether divergence from the over-regulation of the EU was real. We have long campaigned to get rid of the stupid box-ticking that is required countless times a day…
Iain Duncan-Smith’s Taskforce for Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform – the group investigating how the UK can capitalise on its new regulatory freedoms post-Brexit – explained why the ‘Accept Cookies’ request is a waste of time:
“Both behavioural science and common sense tell you that putting a ‘tick to accept’ box in front of someone at the point they want to access a website or service does not generate genuine informed consent, it just means people are likely to tick ‘accept’ without thinking…a good measure of whether reform is successful will be the end of pointless cookie banners.“
Before data privacy fetishists get all angsty, here are some suggestions as to how transparency and privacy can be monitored less intrusively:
Here at Guido, because we want to provide a free-to-air service funded by advertising, we drop advertisers’ cookies. Consequently, we take a militant line against people who want to loot our content without being exposed to the advertising that pays the salaries and expenses that go into producing that content. That is the bargain we make with readers.
Think of the productivity boost from not wasting time every day you are online clicking on irritating cookie banner pop-ups. This alone will make Brexit worthwhile…
