This is great not just from a user's perspective, also the fact that it exists helps pointing out the stupidity of the law.
The real problem here is probably Google Analytics.
Problem is the abuse of technology to track users.
I don't know how aggressively they [google] will have to enforce this but the possibility of losing adsense revenue will be a hugely motivating factor.
So the number of sites the need such warnings is about to increase massively.
I somehow have a feeling that large corporations intentionally are trying to make this law ridiculous. E.g. why blogspot pages would need such warnings? Please Google just stop tracking.
Seems quite straightforward and fair.
And there is plenty of legitimate usages that are not whitelisted. The most notorious is non-shared traffic analysis. Meaning what basic google-analytics offers and half of the internet uses. There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing how many unique visitors you got today, and everyone with a website wants to know that.
Maybe people running those websites want to know that, but as a visitor, I might not want that. Being ablet o tell "how many unique visitors you got today" implies that you can group actions by unique visitors, and thus tell e.g. exactly what I was doing on your website over the course of days. If I'm not logged in, I might not want that.
And don't get me wrong - I'm not really a strong privacy advocate or something. Most of the time I don't care much about tracking. But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on them, nowadays mostly cross-site. It's entirely reasonable people get fed up of being on the receiving end of someone else's malice.
That's like asking the guy behind the counter in a shop to not look at you because as long as you are not buying anything you don't want him to know you are there. You are entitled to your feelings but if you don't want to be seen don't go there, or care enough to open an incognito window.
> But while in theory there's nothing wrong in tracking unique visits, we all know that the primary use of this is to manipulate users and shit ads on them, nowadays mostly cross-site.
No, primary use is regular analytics. 99.9% of websites on the internet are not amazon. And if the law was for cross-site information sharing cookies then this would be a totally different debate, but it is not.
I acknowledge some benefits of this law, but I vehemently oppose it from the perspective of freedom of speech. I know it's an american innovation, but I think other countries should adopt the same principle that code (and algorithms/protocols) should be considered protected speech. I don't like this law because it interferes with http protocol by dictating how the protocol should be used. EU should not curtail the speech of W3C and of any users of their protocol. If you created a popular protocol then other entities shouldn't suddenly and arbitrarily start dictating how users of your protocol should now use it.
EU should either create their own version of http or create their own client for http, which would be relatively cheap as they would only have to fork firefox or chromium and add sandboxing bound to domanins. Some infrastructure is already there with sandboxing in the form of incognito/private window, it only needs to be extended so that each domain is automatically in its own sandbox instead of just websites you open in incognito window.