It's a bit of a pain for website owners, but I think the EU directive is a good thing.
Why? It will make people better aware of what cookies they have, and how they are used. Which is probably a good thing.
Why? It will make people better aware of what cookies they have, and how they are used. Which is probably a good thing.
And nobody cares about that level of technical detail either, and why would they?
If the gov't is so keen on regulating Web stuff, they should have a regulatory body that reviews and audits Facebook's and Google's internal handling of user data, to make sure thay actually don't abuse them secretly.
This cookie thing doesn't make any difference for privacy protection at all.
I've already had to explain to my parents that cookies aren't evil, the sites they visit (BBC/Google etc) are mainstream and fine.
As an EU resident and webmaster of several sites for myself and clients. I see little benefit to my visitors other than causing me a lot of grief over trying to follow guidelines and hoping my implementation doesn't break them.
I was speaking to a client about it today, he hasn't seen anything about it and I doubt many small business owners have seen (or cared) much about it.
Considering web browsers already have cookie controls built in it seems a bit silly incur such an enormous cost in implementing a completely redundant feature.
I think the effort would be better spent on publishing transparent descriptions of what data collected and what it is used for than for designers to each create their own non-standard dialog boxes. The cookie issue could be "fixed" (to the extent possible with pointless legislation) with a link to an EU-published HOWTO on configuring a web browser.
I highly doubt that is the interpretation of "opt in" that the various Data Protection agencies will take.
They are so ubiquitous that browsers typically accept them by default now, but they are still an optional feature. This EU mandate could have been just as well fulfilled by required browser vendors to have the accept cookies warning turned on by default and let users turn it off at their peril. Instead, it has just added another chunk of compliance for web workers to adhere to. Users are still going to be the same ol' users who click "Accept" because they want to get into whatever they were trying to get into. Only now, there's a lot more room for lawsuits.