Hopefully they are going to start suing people regularly (unlike the inaction being taken in the UK) so that business wakes up to this stupid law and finally gets it repealed, the sooner the better.
Some people may value a "degraded" experience over being tracked.
I put "degraded" in quotes because it's often a degraded experience for the company's profits not the end-user.
Please, give us some examples of how this is "devastating" for the UX of a swathe of websites.
FTFY.
Give the user four big buttons.
(1) "Deselect all tracking options. I will choose the ones I want" (2) "Select all tracking optimal user experience, but don't opt me into additional tracking metrics for your use" (3) "Opt me into all tracking options, both those for an optimal user experience and ones that help you improve the service." (4) "Give me the most commonly selected options by previously registered users"
(1) is privacy mode. (2) is privacy mode with some concessions for optimal experience. (3) is okay I'll help you guys out. and (4) is I trust the wisdom of the crowds.
And for what!? To scare the user about cookies? We had the scare about cookies in the 90s when they were explained as "bits of code that websites can infect your machine with".
Cookies are ONE method websites can use to track you. If you click "don't use cookies", the website will just use another method to track you. It's absolutely trivial to bypass.
And it's trivial for any user to configure their browser to reject cookies for any website they wish to.
So what has been achieved by this idiotic law?
Absolutely nothing.
It's yet another fantastic demonstration why the EU is such a bad idea.
Still, I guess I should have been clearer - there are several "non client side" saving technologies which are outside the scope of this law, and make the law completely useless.
Further though, I would criticise the EU whatever the content of this law. We do not need a law to enforce rules about a specific technology of HTTP. What the hell business is it of the EU?
The EU is absolutely obsessed with writing up laws to invade into absolutely every area of our lives.
That is a funny way to frame it! Being European I, for one, welcome a government trying to protect me from the massive, for-profit, privacy invasion and user data trafficking that the internet business currently is.
And, as said before, the "cookie law" applies to any form of user tracking and storing or exchanging user-specific data. You can't code around it. Sending visitor data to Google Analytics server-side could technically hide the cookie, but it would legally be exactly the same as using the cookie based client-side javascript.
The internet is blighted by large images, which use up peoples valuable bandwidth. These should be opt in. Before giving the user a large image, a popup should display to ensure the user wants to download a large image.
Can you not see how crazy it is to start down this road?
The Internet doesn't care what country I'm from, so why are we designing it that way? The same goes for non-US content restrictions as well.
Because the two other options are either to have no laws around the internet, or to designate one organisation (or one country) to define and enforce laws.
I know issues like child safety are often used for over-reaching legislation that's bad for everybody, but that doesn't mean there aren't also valid reasons for governments to be involved here.
Just because the current implementation is often shitty, it doesn't mean we should go the exact opposite way. The same way that disliking things like anti-terrorism legislation don't make most of us think "we need to get rid of all laws".
Take my specific example. If someone hosts a childporn.com that is exactly like any legal porn website but with children, should that be legal or illegal?
"... but on the Internet" is becoming a digital version of the USA's "interstate commerce" clause [1]. Yes, the Internet crosses national borders, but as we see from Megaupload, it can be used by one nation to enforce their laws in another nation that may not have the same laws. Just because activity X is illegal in the US but legal in Germany does not mean there should be a law banning activity X ... but on the Internet. In areas where this should be enforcable, it's already illegal.
[1] Generally the Interstate Commerce Clause is used to regulate economic activity that affects trade between US states. Trade that stays in one US state is regulated at the state level, not the national level. Sometimes this clause can be used/abused to enforce laws the federal government wants enacted just by the government going out of their way to find a reason that an activity is affecting interstate commerce, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
For example, you want to tape everybody and then explain this away with "think of the children: we can catch child molesters this way". This argumentation works only for those who don't know any better. You take them for fools and thus you are not a good partner: you must have some ulterior motives.
If such sites existed, you could probably, at the country level, inject ads for free state-sponsored psychiatric therapy services for users.
AFAICT any thing that is illegal on the internet is usually also illegal in real life. Things that cause no real life damages have no reason to be illegal.
Italy also does this a lot remember the you tube fiasco where they ignored EU law.