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by rednixion 2458 days ago
The "premium" aggregators I've seen used in some enterprise software campaigns can be extra nasty, I had someone at work forward me a link(over IM) that a competitor sent them targeting our userbase(our company name was in the title of the page, contents of the page was why they were better) since mailing to in email on our domain seemed odd; they sent me a "you visited our site, now call for a demo" email a few minutes later that had my full name, a week later they called my parent's house asking for me (guess it was the only historic phone number associated with my name). Ever since then I have viewed tracking data as unacceptable because the likelihood of misuse is only dependent on how much someone is willing to pay an aggregator to turn a small ID indicator into a person.

Also another court has ruled differently about whether or not an IP address is PII: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...

1 comments

Thankfully I am in the US because the EU is nuts. Isn’t it their fault all these websites have a stupid cookie warning? People should just accept the fact that using a web browser means cookies.
While historically the cookie warnings were only an annoyance these days they often have a (working!) option to reject cookies, giving those popups at least some purpose.

Really though setting cookies isn't the problem, and you don't even need to show a popup according to EU law. You only need that popup if you use the cookies for nefarious things such as sending tracking information to ad networks. Setting a cookie for functional things such as remembering logins has always been allowed without a giant-ass disclaimer and nothing has changed in that regard.