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Comment by mstade | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, the requirement of notice could (and should) be pushed on to user agents – not sites. For one, it would help standardize both the user experience of notices – and leave the UX of website specific notices alone – but also it would improve the current state of things where many (most?) sites in the EU simply don't care or know about the legislation.

The last thing we need is more cruft sent across the wire.

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Couldn't agree more with this. The fact that the cookie law is forced on websites is absolutely idiotic. The browsers know what cookies are being set.

Is it actually enforced? Has anyone been taken to court over it?

Not in court but this is a resolution from the spanish data protection agency: http://www.agpd.es/portalwebAGPD/resoluciones/procedimientos... (in Spanish) From the year 2013, this was the first sanction in Spain (3500€ to a jewelry).

You can search for more sanctions here: http://www.agpd.es/portalwebAGPD/resoluciones/procedimientos... Search for "Articulo 22.2 LSSI" or similar

Google has recently been sending out warnings to AdSense publishers who serve content to the EU that they will receive a violation if they are not serving these cookie notices.

This accounts for the seeming uptick in cookie notices. To my knowledge, Google has not enforced this in the past.

My solution was to use CloudFlare to get geotags and PHP to serve the warning to only to those who live in the EU, but to each his own.

But the browser doesn't know why it's set. The idea of the law is to distinguish between cookies which are used for the operation of the site (e.g. login cookies) and the ones that are not (mostly advertising tracking). You only need to give notice about the latter.

That only works if cookies are infrequent enough, like location data, which they aren't. Also there's no way for the browser to know how the cookie is used. I'm all for a technical solution, but I'm not sure it's possible to do "cruft free" without rethinking some things.

And as far as there isn't any "cookie law" on the books, it's about compliance with data protection and privacy regulation. So the EU isn't standing in the way of the industry to do that in another way.

This is what I like about the lynx text browser[0], on navigating to a new host it prompts you to reject or accept cookies: http://i.imgur.com/GEpYVVs.png

[0] http://lynx.invisible-island.net/

You can make Firefox prompt too, unless they removed it in favor of Pocket or video chat.

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