Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Beware: Cookies.

Credit: star5112 / Flickr Creative Commons
This is not the feature I actually wanted to implement next, but here goes.

aprs.fi now displays one of those oh-so-common warnings saying "This site uses cookies". There is some code in there to try to show the warning only to visitors from the European Union, but due to the inherent inaccuracy of GeoIP-type lookups, it may fail either way for some users.

aprs.fi has used cookies from the beginning, just like roughly all the other web sites in the world. Nothing in the use of cookies has changed (they're used everywhere and by everyone), but new regulations set by the European Union, and requirements set by Google, require aprs.fi to display this warning.

Once you click the '✖' button in the corner of the warning, a cookie will be set, so that your selection is remembered, preventing the warning box from appearing again. It'd be annoying if the box appeared every time. If you have disabled cookies, the warning will appear every time, since the web site cannot know if you have dismissed the box before or not, since that information would be stored in a cookie.

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