What to do About ‘Cookies?’ – Try Confused.com!
03/06/2011

Ever imagined what life would be like as an amnesiac? Waking up each morning and wondering who you are and what you’re doing there? It’d be even worse for your spouse or significant other, who’d have to spend all day retelling you your life history – only to begin again the following day!

Somewhat incapacitating, I think you’ll agree. And yet, if the new EU legislation regarding computer ‘cookies’ is enforced with any degree of rigour, the whole on-line community will go down with a severe case of amnesia. No website will remember you, no chat room will welcome you back as an old friend, and no e-business will give you credit – until you’ve re-registered or reset your account with them – which you’d have to do every time you shopped at Tesco, Amazon or wherever.

Unless, that is, you accept up front an agreement that they can use cookies on your computer  – which you’ll still have to do every time you visit a new website. ‘Cookies’, for those of you who may not know, are the memory cells of on-line dialogue, the customer friendly software that ‘remembers’ you when you return to a website like the barman who is already pouring your ‘usual’ when you walk into your local pub.

When the new EU cookie law is enforced – business websites have been given a year to get their act together – it’ll be a bit like those telephone conversations you have with your bank where you have to give a password and listen to an announcement to the effect that ‘this phone call may be recorded and used for training purposes’ before you’re even allowed to talk to a live operator.
Of course, this rather begs the question as to how the new legislation will be enforced, and how web-users are supposed to comply with it in the first place. Think of the near impossibility of enforcing super-injunctions, which has exercised errant footballers and politicians over recent weeks, and you’ll have some idea of the difficulties facing EU legislators.

I mean, what’s to stop you hosting your website abroad, out of the jurisdiction of the EU? Will dot com websites be exempt? And what about international companies like Amazon or Ebay? Nobody knows, and certainly nobody in Brussels has thought it through. What’s more, nobody is going to do anything about it until the position is clarified – probably when somebody gets sued, or Google  comes up with a solution, and we all follow suit.

Frankly, it’s a mess. Perhaps confused.com can help?