Firstly, people (users, website visitors, etc) already have the ability to “opt out” by setting their internet browsers to not allow cookies, or prompt them first.

Secondly addressing your rather sweeping statement about “throwing a tantrum”, business owners are worried that the legislation that comes in will potentially ruin their business, which is a justifiable point of view. For example in order to get “express consent” which is what is required it is possible that some sort of pop-up window will have to be put in place asking for the consent. For businesses that use Google Analytics to track visitors this will become a thing of the past… this will have a massive impact on SEO and conversion optimisation let alone PPC which requires it to work.

Another salient point which your article failed to spot is that there are alternatives to cookies already in place, which can be used just as maliciously and the whole idea of restricting cookie use to times when you have acquired express permission is made redundant by existing technologies that will circumvent this directive.

While we are on the subject of salient point that you missed, the guy responsible for this directive is a qualified historian, with experience as a politician… Having no understanding of technology, internet protocols, or the importance of specific technologies.

One of the main gripes with cookies is related to behavioural advertising… Again this is just ignorance, do people believe that there will be less advertising as a result? Well there won’t, it just won’t be relevant to the user.

These changes are exciting, they are empowering and they bring with them a vast amount of new potential for users, publishers, advertisers and entrepreneurs.

The discussion has not even started yet.

This single page as I read it on 16:25 9/3/2011 had 39 cookies set and 48 cookies replayed from 15 distinct domains. A strict reading of the Directive as amended, which appears favored by head of European Data Protection Peter Hustinx, would therefore be seeking 87 “consents” just to read this page. Note it isn’t just setting cookies that requires consent but also the “gaining of access” to cookies (cookie replays) that equally require consent.

Even discounting a strict reading and moving instead back to just the previous version of the Directive, sites would need to give “clear and precise” information about who is collecting this data, the uses to which data is being put and the opportunity to reject those uses.

The article correctly points out that national transpositions of the Directive may vary and some may indeed be more friendly to entrepreneurs, but I think the point is really that it would be challenging for even entrepreneurs to write the national transposition in a way in which compliance is possible (and last I checked they don’t let businesses draft the laws that govern them).

Read the directive and then turn on a packet sniffer and the problem becomes more clear.

As usual when an industry gets out of bound and hurts consumers the government has to act. Compare it to our traffic laws on the roads and in the air.

Why does the industry not see the dangers of selling realtime personal data? We will have misuse, fraud and criminal actions soon if nobody controls this monster!

I am not against advertising. Yes we need it, and ads do not much harm to a user. And they can use the option to block it. The danger is that personal data gets somewhere else too. Who knows who receives it and what they do with it!

If our industry does not find a solution, then the best solution for the user is not getting bothered with cookies and analytic at all. Enforced by law.