EU-directive will require site owners to get legal permission from users for cookies

[galaxyAbstractor]

July 1 this year a new EU directive is forced upon the member nations, much like the Data Retention Directive was. It says that each site need to get permissions from the users to use cookies, a fundamental function of the Internet.

As many of you know, one use of cookies is to gather site statistics (Awstat, google analytics). This sort of stats is very useful and important to many. Say you are running a business, without cookies you would never be able to tell accurately how many visitors/customers are visiting your site, and what pages they look at, which is good to know when doing planning and product placement etc.

But one of the more important functions of the cookies is session identification, such as pretty much every site that has a login system. Without cookies you wont be able to have a "remember me" setting. Settings at sites will never be able to be saved without cookies.

Sure, getting permission from the user may be easy for the developer who knows what he does and has the money for it. But my concern is, why get permissions from EU users when it is much cheaper to block all EU traffic than develop the site for two regions, pay eventual legal fees and the risk of going to court and be punished for doing it wrong? If this directive gets enforced, the developers will have to code 2 different sets of sites, one that requires permission and checks for it for EU users, and another for the rest. Also, if the developer ignores this out of laziness, ignorance or to save money on the development cost, they may face charges in court.

Also, the suggested way to get this permission is to use popups for each cookie used on the page. The largest Swedish newspaper has 35 different cookies. That means there would be 35 popups you have to accept before being able to see the page.

What would you as a developer do, save money and block all EU users, save money and ignore the directive and face charges or spend money on getting it implemented and possible legal fees?

[cybrax]

The ICO said in its guidance: Websites could obtain consent by asking users to sign up to terms and conditions that detail the use of cookie tracking.

So that's one pop-up or intro/ splash page, a long list of T&C's that nobody reads a and big button that says I accept.

Not exactly a hardship to code even for a complete novice and I would be amazed if any site that IP blocks the entire EU just because they cant be bothered to comply.

[Interscopia]

This is just the Europeans trying to be awkward...

[Smith6612]

This is going to be something tough to enforce. Most forum software I know place cookies in your computer simply by visiting a page. Advertisers do it as part of their ad tracking system. Going to take a lot of time to offer up portals saying "Hey, we want to place a cookie. Is this OK?"

[techairlines]

I have to agree that this would be extremely difficult to enforce. Most websites rely on targeted advertising to generate revenue. So these companies/websites either have to start charging for content or go out of business.

Most website owners won't even know how to properly comply with this so they would probably just block the entire EU.

A lot of websites set so many different cookies that it would just be annoying to approve them all.

The benefits of cookies outweight the negatives. Advertisements are more relevant and useful. Websites are more personalized. I think users should be able to decide for themselves whether or not they want cookies blocked unless explicitly allowed rather than make it the law.

[tufailsharif]

The ICO said in its guidance: Websites could obtain consent by asking users to sign up to terms and conditions that detail the use of cookie tracking.

So that's one pop-up or intro/ splash page, a long list of T&C's that nobody reads a and big button that says I accept.

Not exactly a hardship to code even for a complete novice and I would be amazed if any site that IP blocks the entire EU just because they cant be bothered to comply.

thanQ