Cookies

Cookies are:

Scrapper Duncan’s blog and video channels, like many other websites, use small files called cookies. Cookies are text files that are stored by your browser (e.g. Firefox – the best!) on your computer, mobile phone or any other device which uses the internet. Cookies provide a memory for the blog, enabling it to recognise a user and respond appropriately.

Scrapper Duncan’s cookies:

When you first visit Scrapper Duncan, you are warned about the use of cookies and informed that your continued browsing implies that you have agreed to accept cookies. There are separate warnings for this blog and the video channels. This blog’s own cookies are session cookies, which expire when you leave the blog. Scrapper Duncan also enables third-party cookies, which are discussed from the third paragraph onwards below here but first let’s review the law which has forced these ugly notices on us all.

The reasons we Europeans have bad cookie law:

Almost every website you will ever visit uses cookies – they make the internet, as we know it today, work. The cookie warning has been included to comply with European law as it has been implemented in the UK. The law is being implemented differently in different European countries. Scrapper Duncan considers it to be a bad law – to make informed choices about cookies, people need education, not legislation. We know that having to read and/or click a prefatory message does not truly imply consent (although it does legally). Instead it just makes for an irritating break in an otherwise smooth browsing experience. Also a law which is implemented differently in different countries is inherently flawed, at least so far as life online is concerned. At the time of writing (2nd July 2012), this blog is hosted in the USA but maintained from the UK. It is, of course, available throughout the world.

Recommended tools for self-education and personal filtering of cookies:

Scrapper Duncan recommends using Ghostery to discover how your surfing is monitored by the various websites you visit and Do Not Track to tell websites that comply with that protocol what forms of cookies and other tracking files you will accept. Both are available as free plugins for modern browsers. This blog accepts instructions from the Do Not Track browser plugin (or addon, as it sometimes called). This blog will comply with Do Not Track instructions.

Anonymous analytics cookies:

Every time a user visits Scrapper Duncan, web analytics software provided by various third parties generates anonymous analytics cookies. These cookies can tell whether or not you have visited before. Your browser will reveal if you have these cookies, and if you don’t, new ones are generated. This allows Scrapper Duncan to collect statistical data about the visitors to his blog and video channels. For example, how many individual unique users he gets and how often they visit.

Third party advertising cookies:

Third parties may also set their own anonymous cookies, for the purposes of tracking the success of their application, or customising their application for you. Because of how cookies work, Scrapper Duncan cannot access these cookies, nor can the third parties access the data in cookies used by Scrapper Duncan. For example, the advertising and videos are provided from a third party – even the videos made by Scrapper Duncan himself. Another example concerns when you share an article using a social media sharing button on this blog or the video channels, the social network that has created the button will record that you have done this.

How to disable cookies:

It is usually possible to stop your browser accepting cookies or to stop it accepting cookies from a particular website.

All modern browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. These settings will typically be found in the ‘options’ or ‘preferences’ menu of your browser. In order to understand these setttings, the following links may be helpful, otherwise you should use the ‘Help’ option in your browser for more details.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome
Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS.

If you are primarily concerned about third party cookies generated by advertisers, you can turn these off by going to the Your Online Choices site. You can also visit the trade body representing these advertising platforms for more information: Network Advertising Initative.

For more information:

For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful:

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner’s Office