What looked like an interesting link appeared in
my inbox the other day, so I followed it to read the article. The link in question was to a page on the www . thisismoney . co . uk site - owned and operated by the Daily Mail and proud to describe itself as "Financial Website of the year".
I did
not expect the Daily Mail to let the facts get in the way of a good
story – and this did little to improve my impression of them,
however I was surprised at how poor the performance was....and then
discovered how poor they really were at IT services.
I noticed that the content continued to load for
some time after landing on the page.
Broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk clocks my download
speed at 44.95 Mb/s, not bad, although the latency from Maidenhead
seems high at 168ms RTT. But the page from the Daily Mail took 47.42 seconds to get to the
onload event then continued downloading stuff for a further 42
seconds: 1 minute and 19 seconds to download a single page?
There was only 1.4Mb of data in total, but split
across no less than 318 requests across 68 domains, including 12 404s
from *.dailymail.co.uk, erk!
But digging further I found that the site did not
just perform badly – it's probably illegal.
In addition to (what appears to be) the usual 4
Google Analytics cookies, my browser also acquired session cookies
from .thisismoney.co.uk, .rubiconproject.com, b3-uk.mookie1.com
(x2), .crwdcntrl.net (x2) and.......129 cookies with future expiry
dates.
FFS!
(a full list appears below)
For the benefit of any readers outside the
European Union, member countries must all implement a set of LAWS
(not rules, or guidelines) regarding the use of any data stored on a
computer, including cookies. In the UK, these are described by the
Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment)
Regulations 2011, which websites were required to implement in 2012.
Did the Daily Mail inform me that it was going to store these cookies?
No
Did the Daily Mail ask for my consent to store these cookies?
No
Did the Daily Mail provide any information about cookies on the page?
No
Did the Daiy mail provide a link to their privacy policy on the page?
Yes, in teeny-weeny text – the very last visible
element on the page.
Did the Daily Mail offer me a chance to opt-out of accepting the cookies?
No
Is this a world record?
Maybe?
In the absence of any means to tell the Daily Mail
I don't want their cookies via their website, I thought I would use
the method built into my browser (although the cookie law does
require that I should not have to jump through these hoops for
compliance). So I enabled the do-not-track feature in Firefox deleted the cookies and cache, hit the reload button, waited a
further 44 seconds (my ISP has transparent caching).....
Can you guess what happenned next?
All the cookies came back again.
The challenge
Do you know of a worse site than this for dumping cookies? Add a comment and a link to your analysis and I'll publish it.
