The Cookie Monster is taking the biscuit

So the busyness really started on Friday afternoon. After a typically lazy day at work that mainly involved attempting to figure out the most comfortable position to put my feet up, I got changed into my shorts and spent a good hour in my gym. I then got up at 4.30am on Saturday morning to drive down to Dorset for a weekend of racing. A 3 hour race was followed by another 4 hours of being a journalist. I then had a 45 minute trek to the hotel where I spent the evening consuming large quantities of alcohol. I was then up at stupid o’clock on Sunday morning to drive back to the circuit for more racing. I finished 3rd by the way.

It was then a 4 hour drive back home. I had just about enough time to jump in the shower before heading out to first have a drink with the future in-laws and then have dinner with my parents.

Monday was another early start. A quick session in the gym was followed by a trip out with my beloved future wife to get our wedding rings. I then went out for a 30 mile bike ride. I then did some work in the garden and helped beloved clean the house because I’m a modern 21st Century man who believes in equality – unless it involves admitting that Americans and French are equals. We then hosted a barbeque in the afternoon and had rather a late night.

Tuesday was spent writing articles for Karting Magazine and also plotting this very rant before I got back to my proper job of doing something that involves the Interweb or something like that.

In other words I had a very productive weekend. I am also having a very productive week so far. I have sold a few more apps, worked on a new job prospect, entertained clients, made good progress with publishers, written all my race reports and solved a technical problem that has been testing my Tourettes syndrome to its limits. In doing so, I have managed to achieve a rather splendid bit of technical wizardry that reaffirms my theory that I may very well be a genius.

Despite having been in the business for over a decade, I still get a sense of enormous satisfaction when I solve a programming conundrum or come up with a fantastically original and pretty design for a website.

However, when I’ve spent a day struggling over a technical issue that stubbornly refuses to do what I want it to, or I’ve been sat in a meeting listening to some bloated executive waffle on and being mistakenly convinced of his own self-importance, I’m left feeling rather deflated.

This is because I like to feel I’ve been productive. People whose roles are defined by sitting in meetings and talking bollocks should be drowned in their own aftershave. Bureaucrats who sit around making up jobs for themselves by coming up with nonsense regulations in a vague attempt to justify their existence are among the worst kind of prat in my opinion.

Take Christopher Graham for example. He is an “Information Commissioner”. What the hell that means I have no idea. He has recently made amendments to the “Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations” or PECR for short. The irony of that acronym sounding like the word “pecker” is not lost on me.

Anyway, he is a guy with a receding hairline, silly spectacles and a face that just screams “punch me”. He has taken it upon himself to force websites to ask for consent when they place things called “cookies” on a user’s browser.

Now I’m not talking about biscuits here. Cookies are temporary text files that get written to a user’s computer when they visit a website. They are written when the website needs to remember user preferences. For example, our Webshop app uses a form of cookie when a customer adds items to their shopping basket. The system needs to remember what that customer has added so it stores it in something called a “session” where it stores all their shopping data until they have either bought the item or left the shop. It is the same when that user logs into their account to purchase the items. The system needs some way of remembering who they are so it stores a temporary record on the user’s computer. These files usually expire after about 20 minutes of inactivity.

So what are all these websites expected to do? Will they now have to ask the user’s permission every time they perform an action? Does this mean that every time someone adds something to their basket a message has to pop up saying “Are you sure you want to add this item to your basket? Your computer needs to be aware of this.”? Whenever someone logs in does a message asking “Are you sure you want to log in?” have to appear? These kind of patronising dialogue boxes are bad enough on Microsoft products. I personally don’t want them appearing on all websites.

And what about web stats? Objects like Google Analytics effectively track a visitor’s activity on a website. Is this spying? Not really. It’s called gathering useful information so the owner of the website can use the data to improve the user experience in the future. Or put simply, good business.

What these idiotic and uneducated EU morons need to realise is not all cookies are invading privacy. They can be used for granting authentication, storing useful data, storing site preferences to make the user’s experience on the site better and gathering useful data about their visiting trends to, again, make their experience better on their next visit.

Sure websites that place invasive or malicious objects on computers should be targeted but then any good anti-virus or anti-spyware program should solve that. Also, anyone viewing websites that install those kinds of Trojans are obviously looking at porn and deserve to be hacked.

So Mr Graham, do you actually know anything about computer programming? Do you even know how to use the Internet? No you don’t do you? You’re just a pointless EU bureaucrat with a very small PECR.