On June the 2nd, a new Italian law about cookies took effect. Basically it imposes:

  • to notify the user about the usage of so called technical cookies, and
  • to ask the permission to use profiling cookies (and blocking them until this permission is accorded).

For bloggers (like me) whom do not own the platform where their contents are published, this is quite troublesome since I don't think I'm able to stop anything that is delivered by Ghost (that is the kind provider of this virtual place).

By the way, I think that, if someone is concerned about privacy violations made through cookies, he can simply disable them in his browser. Here there are the instructions for the most common browsers:

Anyway, cookies are just one among many ways to track users. Below there is a small (and incomplete) list.

Local Storage

This feature, introduced by HTML5, allows a website to save some data on your PC to be recalled later. If now you are thinking that this is what cookies are for, you are right. There is only one small difference: cookies are meant to be used by the server, while local storage is managed client side only.

But this is not a big protection, since with JavaScript is quite easy to transfer local storage information to the server.

Flash Cookies

Videos, apps and animations based on this old technology are gradually disappearing, however Adobe Flash is still widely used and its cache can be used to store information. So even if regular cookies are deleted, they can be recreated from this cache.

You can protect yourself with this Firefox add on that deletes Flash cookies when you close the browser (I don't know if there is something similar for other browsers).

Images

No, I'm not joking. Images generated on the fly by the server and the usage of the entity tag (ETag) to deal with cache invalidation can be used as a extremely persistent cookie.

The main defense you can adopt against this threat is to always use private mode navigation (or incognito mode) in your browser.

Evercookie

There is also a proof of concept that uses all the above methods and many other in order to create an immortal cookie. More information about evercookie at this link.

Your Browser

Every browser provides some information to the servers it connects to, like the underlying operating system, the screen resolution, the number of installed addons, the system fonts, etc. All these data can be used to create a fingerprint of your browser that is suitable for tracking.

You can learn more in this article on the EFF website.

Conclusions

Blocking regular cookies is just a resolution that doesn't fix the problem of being tracked in our habits. This is a more general problem that a law enforced by a single nation cannot solve.

Image credits: gratisography.com