Ask HN: I removed every cookie from my blog, because Cookie Law. Am I wrong? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I removed every cookie from my blog, because Cookie Law. Am I wrong?

8 pointstrumbitta28 comments

As some of you may know, in the coming days the infamous Cookie Law will begin to reap souls in Europe and Italy (I'm based in Italy, so...)

I could have added an ugly and invasive banner, plus a convoluted privacy policy to my poor little blog [1]. I should have.

Instead, at some point during preparations, I decided to get rid of all cookies and cookie-placing services.

Because I'm angry at those bureaucrats who would want me to have a privacy policy because I use Disqus as a commenting system.

So I got rid of:

- Disqus, and I am thinking of opening a Facebook Page where I will repost articles from the blog and allow commenters to do their thing

- ConvertKit, and I am done with drip email marketing

- Gumroad iframe, and instead I have now direct links to Gumroad

- BootstrapCDN, and I now serve bootstrap and fontawesome by myself

This leaves me bitter and angry, but I think I'm doing the right thing.

What about you?

[1] My uninteresting blog: http://www.williamghelfi.com/

You run a technical blog. If it makes you feel any better my browser is configured to block all the content you removed anyhow. And I suspect lots of your readers are like me.

I am glad to see the pendulum shift in favor of consumers and privacy, although the libertarian side of me makes me question the need for more laws dictating how businesses behave.

How do you usually deal with those two somewhat opposing views?

On an issue-by-issue basis.

In this case I'd want the regulations to apply to Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS web browsers (only) and force those browsers to display a boilerplate notice about cookies when they're detected... rather than putting the burden on the much larger set of end websites and API providers.

In general there's not a permanent way to reconcile consumer rights with business rights. One thing that would help a lot is to restrict/ban money in politics so that at least each side of the debate has a more equal voice. Although in this case the side without money won.

Personally I guess my outlook is that of a moderate... or maybe a left-leaning libertarian.

Does hosting your website elsewhere fix the problem? I'm not familiar with the details of the law, but I'd be interested to find out if this fixes your problem.

AFAIK, nope

I want to go this route as well, but I am addicted to Google analytics. Any other services people can recommend?

Grep your server logs! There are open source analytic tools available as well like http://piwik.org/ .

+1 for piwik

IIRC, piwik works two ways. One with a tracking cookie like Google Analytics. Another is with a tracking pixel on every page. (When they load the pixel, it registers a pageview.)

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