Online Privacy And The New Cookie Law

I was invited to the EU parliament building in Brussels to discuss the recently introduced ‘cookie law’ and how it affects users, site owners and online privacy as a whole. We also discussed ‘EU Commission Action 17 of the Digital Agenda’ with regards to online trustmarks.

I presented a position that the introduction of the law was premature, ill-conceived and adversely affects how users navigate the internet. Site owners also suffer due to dropped sessions when faced with popups warning of cookies and site analytics can be skewed. There was also the technical difficulties of implementing a technical solution to the issue of managing and/or blocking cookies. (A situation I solved through Informed Choices and our privacy plugin which uses css and javascript to hide/show sections of code which place cookies.)

As the EU is a modern, democratic organisation fairly representing the views of its member states,  my comments were disregarded and I was not invited to the next meeting.

On the way out I stole a pen which broke some days later.