Cookies!

Cookies has always been a topical subject. If you are overweight and eating a cookie, ‘shame on you’, although the blue cookie monster, basically made cookies eating, in whatever way fashionable much to our relief. Although one could liken the way the cookie monster eats his cookies to the way cookies are haphazardly thrown onto our digital devices as though there are no rules.

However, there are rules, it is just they are not well understood, basically missing valuable guidance, in a non-technical way on ‘cookie management’. The .ICO has come up with some great detailed guidance, and have even implemented a super example of how cookies should be used. I am just wondering what type of coding was required to achieve this, because I know that the platform we are using doesn’t support this.

This brings me to another subject privacy by design. I often get asked the question, when I provide advice “but is this database GDPR compliant?”. I almost laugh, because we are in an in-between phase right now. Apart from ripping out what we have today and replacing with ‘state-of-the-art’, which the GDPR states is not necessary…It is only those platforms which have been built using privacy by design principles, of which there aren’t many right now, which are pure-bred GDPR-compliant. Clearly if your system is running on an operation system from the 1980s and doesn’t support encryption, and other security mechanisms, you could be having problems sleeping right now 😉

In main, the technology needs to be made good enough if certain mitigations are implemented, which are normally not technical, they are more to do with locking down processes and education of employees.

This is not a PbD approach, it is bolted on privacy, things can still go wrong if we need to depend on humans following processes. So until embedded privacy is the default in all technology, the beautiful privacy notice on the .ICO website, I guess I will need to wait for until I can get a technical guy in to make this happen for Privasee.

Unless anyone knows how they did it? I’ll love to know…