Simon Willison’s Weblog

Thirty five year old cookies

I’m finding myself slightly confused about the Google backlash washing around the blogosphere, which is summarised quite well by Gavin Sheridan. Most of the arguments against using Google unsurprisingly centre around privacy issues, in particular the “35 year cookie”. I was under the impression that cookies could only be set for a maximum of a year, but having checked Netscape’s Cookie Specification and RFC 2965 it appears I was mistaken.