We have taken the T. E. Lawrence Studies website offline, because anonymous analytics cookies – used to understand how visitors use the site so that we can make it work better  – do not comply with EU privacy law. This law has now been implemented in the UK (though not, according to media reports, in some other parts of the EU).

Andrew’s tweet read:<br />

“Ryanair exhibit A. Looked up fare yesterday, total £123.00. Returned today and fare is £237.00. Flushed cookies. Fare back to £123.00.”<br />

What this means is that Ryanair has purposefully tracked when Andrew’s visited the site, looked at a specific fare and not made a booking. Usually this sort of thing is done for targeted advertising across other sites, but Ryanair it seems has something else in mind. The next time Andrew visited the site to look at the same fare he had look at previously, Ryanair had hiked up the cost. I assume this is to get a customer to worry that the cost will go up further and book a trip there and then.

If you haven't realized it yet, companies are tracking you across most of the sites you visit daily on the web. It's quite likely that these companies know more about you than your government. Some of them might even know more about you than your best friends.

In other words, many companies are taking advantage of Internet Explorer’s poor cookie blocking implementation for their own purposes. Their excuse is that P3P is dead and IE’s cookie blocking would break their website, so they just work around the browser’s privacy controls.

Apple's dominance on tablets and smartphones presents a threat to accurately measure and optimize the performance of paid-search marketing campaigns… While Mac users also rely on other browsers, Safari remains the dominant search browser used on the iPhone and the iPad, which results in higher rates of undercounted conversions on Apple devices. All browsers can present challenges for advertisers, but Apple's focus on consumer privacy limits the viability of third-party cookie-based tracking systems.

Marin's research also suggests that the conversion tracking issue is a much bigger problem than previously thought. On average, advertisers using third-party cookie-based tracking systems are undercounting conversions by 38%, severely limiting visibility into campaign performance. The white paper, however, does provide somewhat of a workaround.

[Safari's] blocking [of] third-party cookies can make iOS conversion rates appear lower than conversion rates on Windows, but the study found that the actual conversion rates for iOS, minus for the third-party cookie based undercounting, were on average 23% higher than on Windows.

When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.