Understanding Cookie Law

On 27th May 2012 the UK’s implementation of the EU’s “Cookie Law” will come in force. My own personal opinion aside, I wanted to take the time to actually read and digest the UK’s interpretation of this EU directive and summarise what it means for users and web developers.

The reason why we have this law

Studies suggest that the majority of internet users don’t know what cookies are and what information can be accessed by certain websites. This raises obvious privacy concerns.

The target of this law is to try and prevent or dissuade website owners and content producers from collecting unnecessary information. The main target of this law appears to be third-party cookies, those that are often set by advertising networks to track a user’s global site preferences while browsing. This law makes it very difficult for them to ask for consent.

What the law actually states

The law is based on a privacy-based EC Directive from 2002, which was later amended in 2009 to require consent for the storage or access of information on a user’s device (a cookie). The UK implemented this change on the 25th May 2011, but delayed the compliance date by one year. It’s the Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO) job in the UK to inform us, the public, of changes to the law and what is required of us. 

The law is pretty clear. Websites of individuals and businesses based in the EU must comply, regardless of the where the web host is located or where the website’s visitors are accessing the site from.

Websites have to:

  • Tell users there are cookies on the site
  • Explain why you have cookies
  • Get the user’s consent to store a cookie on their device

For example, this blog would be required to tell the user that a cookie will be saved on their device, which anonymously tracks user interactions on this site (Google Analytics). This site would then need to ask the user for consent to store these cookies.

According to the ICO’s guidance, the user’s consent should be required before you set any cookies. In practice, however, the ICO recognises that most websites load cookies as soon as the site loads. In such cases, site owners should do whatever possible to inform the user as soon as possible that cookies are present and explain clearly what the cookies are for. As implementation becomes universal in the future, expect consent to become Opt-In only.

Who needs to comply with the law?

The law will apply to all website owners within the EU. This not only includes organisations and business, but individuals with blogs and private websites. Any site that sets a cookie, where the owner of the site is based within in the EU, regardless of where the site is hosted, must obtain consent.

Like every law, there are exceptions (hooray!):

  • Cookies used to remember goods when they proceed to a checkout
  • Cookies that comply with stricter security principles, such as online banking
  • Cookies that help distribute workload across numerous computers (e.g. Amazon EC2)

As the majority of websites use tools such as Google Analytics, pretty much everyone will need to think about implementing this.

How to comply with the new law

Fortunately for those in the know, satisfying the new law can be achieved by a small script. Unfortunately for those who don’t know anything about front-end web development may find it a bit moredifficult. Here’s two tools than can help:

If you want to fully comply with the law however, you will need to prevent all cookies being stored until the user has agreed. As a cookie is actually required to remember a user’s choice, users that decline to accept cookies will be informed and asked the same question each time they access the site.

The above tools will likely put you in good stead with the ICO for the foreseeable future, but when Opt-In is fully enforced, you should be preventing cookies altogether until the user agrees.

Other Useful reading

My tips on getting your first office

In March of this year I decided to finally get Applingua some office space. Since starting the company in January 2011, I have been travelling around, working pretty much anywhere.

Working from your bedroom, dining room table or at Starbucks may seem glamourous, but when you have client obligations and need to fully concentrate, these places can get frustrating quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the flexibility for a year but eventually I, and Applingua, needed some structure.

Finding an office at first seemed almost impossible. While you will find some properties on websites such as Rightmove, they are mostly long term, high lease, commercial spaces. You’ll also find tonnes of serviced offices.

You’ll find serviced offices pretty much around the world. These cold, soulless places may be good if you’re a team, but on your own the price mounts up quickly. I visited a couple and found them to be the polar opposite of what any web-based start up would be looking for.

I then contacted some commercial estate agents, but they too could only come up with long lease, high service cost places. So what other option do you have?

If you live in a big city, you are likely to be fortunate to have several co-working spaces available. These places are genius: you rent a desk among similar like-minded people and work independently, but share services such as internet and overheads. Mark my words: co-working is going to be the way most people work in 50 years time. It gets people out of the house, into a work environment but gives them the flexibility to manage their own time and work remotely wherever they are in the world.

In a small city like Cardiff however, your co-working options are limited. So I tried something similar.

Searching Google, I made a list of small businesses in the area whose work I respect: designers, web agencies, developers, etc. All businesses that don’t compete with me in any way, but where I knew there’d be people who understood my business. I then emailed them.

My email asked whether they had any space available. Space for two or three desks where I and my first employee could sit. Low and behold, two companies had space! I’ve now moved in with one of them :-)

Nothing ventured, nothing gained I suppose.

 

Software I couldn’t work without

I recently noticed there are a set of apps in my Dock which are constantly open. I use them all every single day, almost without fail. Why not write yours in the comments below – these are mine!

The Hit List

The Hit List – It took more than 10 years to move away from pen & paper. After 10 years of failed electronic todo lists, came The Hit List. On the face of it you just press Enter, type your todo and that’s it. But if you need it, there are lots of powerful features that keep you organised and delivering my projects on time.

BBEdit – I’m in the business of text. Lots of it and in many languages. BBEdit is the perfect text editor: colour coding, auto-completion, folder view, support for every text encoding under the sun. I switched from SubEthaEdit to BBEdit and, apart from collaboration, it outclasses it in every way.

Skype – I communicate with up to 30 different people in one day. They may be clients or translators, friends or family. Despite a lot of grumbles about Skype’s UI, I couldn’t imagine doing my job without it. Years ago I used to use iChat, but you couldn’t rely on it and it wasn’t universal. I’m a paid Skype user and I love it.

Notational Velocity – Dealing with so many requests and projects, Notational Velocity is a simple, UI-clean way of keeping track of payments. In accounting terms it’s my log book. It syncs with SimpleNote too so I’m always able to get hold of my information. Really easy, no thought note tracking.

MarsEdit – MarsEdit was a surprising purchase. After losing many wordpress posts mid-writing, I decided to look for a native client. MarsEdit makes posting and updating your blog ridiculously easy. Not only that, productivity has increased ten-fold. I write far more of these annoying posts than every before :-)

Espresso - Everyone who works with HTML/CSS has a favourite app. Mine is Espresso. A few years ago when I was comparing it to Coda, it just worked for me. Espresso 2 is even better and makes making changes to my website a breeze.

Spotify - Last but not least, a little fun while working. Spotify was easily my best purchase of 2011. I’ve discovered so much music, something I was quite lazy at doing before. People actually ask me “how come you have so much music?” and within 10 minutes they’ve bought a subscription too. Just great.

Outsourcing small jobs cheaply

I probably have about 100 different ideas a week. They can be anything from future Applingua plans to completely new business ideas to something as simple as a blog post. Most ideas are instantly unviable, but there are often a few which get jotted down in The Hit List for future consideration. Unfortunately they often get left there simply due to time constraints.

One such idea was a blog post I recently published to Applingua’s Blog, listing the Top 100 Paid Mac OS X apps and their localizations. I knew in order to make the blog post more valuable to me, my clients and the blog’s audience, I needed to delve a little deeper than just studying one app store. I also knew surveying 100 apps across several stores would take a lot of my time, which I needed for client projects.

After weeks of putting it off, I decided to write a quick job on oDesk (if you are interested, the job post is at the bottom of this page). The applicants had to be able to navigate the Mac App Store proficiently, enter information into Numbers or Excel and do a little research on Google to find out where each developer was located. It’s a classic data entry job.

Within 15 minutes I had 4 applicants. I sent three of them the job and asked them to do the research and get back to me in their own time. There was no rush.

A few hours later, a guy called Ramon got back to me with the finished work. I was amazed not only by the speed, but also quality of his work and friendly replies. His portfolio told me he was based in the Philippines and is an iWork and iLife “expert” looking for all kinds of work including mundane data entry. Perfect. I instantly hired him again, asking him to do 4 other stores and then to amalgamate all 7 excel sheets to find a set of statistics. I provided the sums and short descriptions.

A few days later all the hard work was done and all I had to do was quickly check over the stats and write the blog post. In total, my time ~1 hour. Had I done the store research myself, it would have been ~2 hours per store * 7 + amalgamation + statistics + coffee breaks + the data entry boredom effect. Easily 2 and a half days on one blog post. The post is an important one, but I can’t justify 2.5 days off client work for it.

The point of this post is you can do this too. Look at your todo list, set aside a small budget and outsource all the small, time consuming jobs you can.

Just because you don’t want to do them, doesn’t mean others won’t.

Hi Guys! *** Max 1.5/2 hour job ***

I’m looking for several Mac users in different countries to do some research for me on the Mac App Store. 

I am looking to extend this blog post:
http://applingua.com/blog/2011/10/itunes-usa-top-50-paid-apps-localizations/

You must be:
– A Mac OS X 10.6.x or 10.7.x user. If you don’t know what this is, stop now :-)
– Know what the Mac App Store is. How to access it. How to navigate it
– Have Excel or Numbers installed to work on spreadsheet

What you would need to do:
– Look at the attachment to this project. There is an excel sheet and a screenshot. The excel sheet tells you what you need to record.
– Launch the Mac App Store
– Go to the Top 100 Paid Applications in your Country’s Store
– Click on each app. 
– Make a note of the available languages (See screenshots)
– Now, the difficult bit: go to the developer’s website and find out where the developer works (USA, UK, etc). You may need to use http://www.who.is if it’s not obvious.

Any questions, just ask!!

Thanks,
Rob

I can’t use two computers for business

Despite years of wanting “the perfect setup”, an iMac in tandem with a MacBook Air, I’ve come to the conclusion it just doesn’t work for me. Sure, it’s nice going on the odd day out with the Air, knowing I can check eMails and do any emergency work if I need to, but if you spend a week or weeks away from home as I recently did, having two machines is a bit of a headache. Even despite the many cloud sync options available today.

This year I’ve been fortunate enough to own both a MacBook Air and iMac. For the most part it’s been excellent. Work has been sync’d perfectly over Dropbox, making it easy as pie to pick up from where I left off during the odd day trip. But anything longer than a day or two and it starts to become a real problem.

Applications get updated all the time. Maintaining two sets and having to keep them up-to-date not only hogs bandwidth, it takes time when I should be working. When I have big projects on, I forget command line tools or helper apps I’ve installed along the way. Not to mention app preferences, email signatures, keychains and the like (this was great in MobileMe, but is no longer in iCloud…). If this were Twitter, we’d be calling it only a #firstworldproblem, but the fact remains that many people would like a two-computer setup, but I’m just saying I’m not sure it’s worth the extra effort.

Then there’s the matter of iTunes and iPhoto. I like to have my photos on the move, but I hate having to double copy photos back on my iMac when I get home. The same for Music, redownloading everything from iTunes and keeping Playlists in sync. I’ve actually recently become a paid Spotify and I’m really happy with that.

The cloud is supposed to be the answer to everything, but it’s not realistic with our current average internet speeds to expect people to store 50GB iPhoto or iTunes libraries online. For work purposes, Dropbox has been incredible and I’m constantly recommending it to people. But again, Dropbox is for documents and the odd media file and not really practical or big enough to sync my photo and music library.

Things are changing however. I can see potential in Apple’s iCloud for example. They’ve tried to address the photo issue with Photo Stream and music with iTunes Match (US). I can’t help but think these are designed with silicon valley people in mind and not your average person who doesn’t live in a city. Calendars and Contacts are great, but the rest still feels like we’re in the early stages (for example, Apple’s productivity suite, iWork, hasn’t yet been updating on the Mac but has on iOS).

So, I’ve decided to sell up. I want one Mac that is powerful enough to not hold me up when working, but portable enough not to break my back while travelling. I’m replacing both machines with the “Ultimate” MacBook Air: 13″, 1.8Ghz i7 (BTO only), 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD. I’ll write up my first impressions and post them shortly. Meanwhile the 11″ Air has been sold and the iMac will be going up shortly (contact me if you are interested).

Making money online

For years I struggled to make real money online. Apart from making the odd website, staring at a screen doesn’t bring in cash. It’s a dream many people have, especially those who want to free themselves from their desk and become more “location independent”. Well I’m making money online now and I’ve learnt a lot along the way. I want to share with you what I know.

This article already sounds like link bait, right? Just like one of those posters that used to litter lamp-posts “earn cash at home” or the countless spam emails you probably receive every day. Well it’s true to a certain extent you won’t be able to earn money online if you are not comfortable with your computer or if you don’t possess any sales drive. Finding work online requires you to be able to sell yourself and sell yourself well. There’s no manager to hand work out to you, you have to go looking for it and you have to tell potential “employers” why you are best for the job, no matter how big or small it is.

Human Intelligence Tasks – HITs

Anyone who has managed to navigate to this blog is already overqualified for most of the work on Mechanical Turk, a website set up by Amazon in 2005 to human-automate tasks. It works by developers submitting small tasks to the website which need a human to decipher results.

An example: someone with a website would like to display summaries of wikipedia articles on their website. A computer can’t decide what sounds best, so the developer creates a HIT on MTurk. You apply, navigate to a list of wikipedia articles the developer specifies and then copy and paste a succinct summary of the article (maybe the first two or three lines).

Pay is very low, but these tasks are quick. You can easily do several an hour to rack up some change.

Qualified Jobs (Anyone with any skill, grad or non-grads)

Can you proofread, administrate, project manage, write blog articles, edit photoshop files, make PowerPoints, edit CSS or HTML, translate or speak another language? Can you web design, write reviews, check spreadsheets, answer support tickets or take good photos? Basically, can you do anything semi-skilled? You will almost certainly find something for you on oDesk.com, vWorker.com or GetAFreelancer.com. The work is usually time limited, but there are also positions that last 6 months to a year.

An example: you know how to use some photo editing tools (like Photoshop, Gimp, etc) and a company is looking for some customer support. They want you to login up to 10 hours a week, answer as many support tickets as possible, and get paid for each email you answer. It’s nice when work in = pay out.

Pay ranges from very low (simple admin / web research) to high (development / web design / etc). I have employed lots of translators in the past from these platforms and it works very well.

Creative Minds

If you are creative, you can make things and sell them on etsy.com. You can take photos and sell them on iStockPhoto.com. If you can design websites, sell themes for good money on ThemeForest.com. Hey, even if you have a good voice-over voice, or are just particularly attractive while holding a sign that mentions a company’s name, check out fiverr.com. There are hundreds of alternatives to these sites, but these are some big names.

The post-Apple internet is crying out for creative people. If you can offer a few freebies to a developer or company, they’ll almost surely recommend you. If they don’t, you’ll have gained work for your professional portfolio. Win-win.

Online to Offline World

If you’re into manual labour, helping people with their shopping, building ikea furniture, cleaning pools, take a look at the likes of TaskRabbit.com orMyTaskAngel.co.uk. This is a growing market and I imagine you’ll see a lot more from the likes of TaskRabbit in the near future.

If you have a spare room or two then rent them out by the night on AirBnB.com. You’re protected by their guarantee and you can also check out guest reviews from other hosts if you’re afraid.

Live in a city? Rent out your parking space on ParkAtMyHouse.com. People in big cities are making real money from this ingenious idea.

Scared about your CV?

If you do decide to go at it alone to fund your travels or just to get out of full-time work for a year or so, you may be afraid what effect it will have on your Cv. Well I can’t tell you that for sure and it all depends on the person interviewing you for your next career job.

In my opinion, any one who has gone out looking for work (being “entrepreneurial”), sold themselves as the right person for the job (“sales & marketing”), budgeted their own expenses (“financial skills”) and managed their own clients, deserves to be praised for it. At the end of the day it will come down to how you sell yourself in the interview, but surely a potential employee who has worked for several different clients doing varied work and getting experience, is better than someone who “just” took two years off.

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