Mastodawn

Dear BBC, why does a public-funded national broadcaster need to set cookies that cross the GDPR threshold for its articles to be read uninterrupted?

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Jonathan Schofield 3d ago

…The BBC currently sets 97 cookies it regards as “strictly necessary” and cannot be opted out of.

97!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/usingthebbc/cookies/strictly-necessary-cookies/

What strictly necessary cookies does the BBC use?

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Jonathan Schofield 3d ago

…One of the angles its cookies policy statements bang on about is things it ‘has’ to do to serve international audiences.

But aren’t there good geolocation APIs these days which mean that UK visitors don’t need to be treated like they *might* be from outside the UK by default?

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@pndc

@urlyman The BBC actually uses strong geolocation on pretty much all of its sites (including dynamic detection of VPNs and proxies; they're not just buying in GeoIP databases), since that's how they decide whether to serve advertising, force-redirect from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com, block access to iPlayer, etc. So it's not a credible excuse to claim that they can't tell whether a visitor is in the UK or abroad.