This is a question that I am not sure of the answer to but it is something that I’ve thought about before. Saving a cookie to a user’s machine used to be something that concerned new Internet users but I am not so sure that people care too much anymore.
What reminded me of this was that this morning I saw a tweet by Steven Frank, of Panic, which read: "I’m bugged by "Remember me" checkboxes. I’d rather stay cookied and just log out of my desktop OS account. Or use the site logout button.".
I think this is a relatively minor issue since the person logging in only needs to decide whether to check a single box or not – but it may be something that we could remove from our layouts altogether.
What do you think? Do you feel this ‘feature’ is imperative or, at this point, not as needed?
My personal opinion is that it isn’t needed because more often than not I want the site to set a cookie so that I stay logged in. But I use a laptop and bring it with me nearly everywhere I go. So for me, this is a matter of convenience not of security. Others may bounce from cafe to cafe, college computer lab to computer lab, and will view this much more as a security issue – and probably feel differently than I do.
Thoughts?