laravel/laravel — Issue #210: Session Cookies / European Privacy Directive
Author: sovietuk
Created: 2011-12-13 16:24:09+00:00
State: open

Hello,

Not sure if you're aware, but the European parliament passed (about 6 months ago) a directive that effectively bans European sites from setting cookies in a persons browser without first gaining their approval...

Yes - this is insane - just about every framework / CMS likes to set a session cookie right from the start :-(

Certainly here in the UK most of us developers were hoping that the Information Commissioners Office (who deal with that side of things for the UK Government) would resist it / come up with a more practical alternative. They were taken a bit by surprise by it all and decided to effectively postpone it for a year while they and everyone else worked out the implications/solutions.... they've announced today that they're still expecting people to deal with it as per the directive by May 2012 - joy!

( http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2011/half-term-report-on-cookies-compliance.aspx )

So... just had a quick snoop through session/payload.php , it looks like the session cookie is always set for any page request - would be great if Laravel could be amended to have a config option of not creating a session unless explicitly told to do so, tho haven't worked out yet how much of a pain that would be architecturally - just thought i'd give a heads up that this will increasingly be a big headache for European coders :-(