When should cookie consent end?
When should cookie consent end?
After every visit? After a day? A week? A year? A lifetime? A 100 years? A 1000 years? Longer? Surely not! I was really surprised…
Website cookies improve a persons browsing by holding small amounts of data on a person. It comes in helpful when revisiting a regular website. A good example is having a shopping basket full on a website and it being there even if you leave and come back again. Obviously, this somewhat invades a persons privacy. So laws, like GDPR in Europe, have been put in place in recent years for people to approve consent for cookies. But how long should that consent last?
Websites reveal the details of all the cookies on their site. Telling the person, the company who owns the cookie, what the cookie is doing and the expiry date of that cookie. These can range from expiring on every visit. Or after, 1 day, 1 week, 1 year, etc.
Let’s look at some cookie examples with an average consumer electronics website. https://www.digitaltrends.com
Digging around on here before I consent to cookies, I can look through them all. It is very revealing. The chart below examples only a few of the hundreds of cookies being used on that website. What it shows more than anything is how little consideration towards an end of consent there is.
I am in late 40’s even with my best intentions, I am not gonna live much longer than 90 years. So Acuity’s consent is going to be worthless, cause I would have probably been dead for a decade or so before it expires. Likewise adt.com’s request for consent at 100 years is surely pointless. Unless they want to track new borns who have access to great healthcare for the rest of their lives.
Then we get in to the world of ludicrous consent lifespan.
Home Depot is asking for me to approve something for…
599999 days. Which is 1642 years
That is a big ask. I am certainly dead. But also multiple generations of my ancestors. But, on the bright side, it does assume we survived climate change. Yay!
If we reversed the direction of that approval. It would go back to 378 AD. Which is nearer the end of the Roman Empire. Just before the sacking of Rome in 410 AD. Imagine the forethought of a Roman citizen approving something that would expire this year. Imagine their lack of knowledge for what was coming over the following 1600 + years.
But if that doesn’t baffle your mind regarding absent endings in your cookie consent, then maybe the Digital Trends website’s own cookie will make your mind melt.
It is 2914550 days. Which is 7979 years.
If we went a similar distance back in time, it would take us to around 6000 BC. The time of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities. Long before the bronze age at 3000BC. Imagine a person of that time, equipped with little more than a spear or flint, trying to grapple with the forethought to approve consent until the year 2020?
I feel similarly ill equipped to give consent for 2914550 days. I am not sure what is going to happen in my lifetime, let alone imagine what is going to happen by the year 10000!
I think we need to think about endings of consent in cookies. What do you think?
