This legislation makes me die a little inside each time it comes up, utterly futile crap that will be ignored or worked around via more nefarious means by those that abuse tracking methods anyway.<p>Why they didnt legislate that it be baked into the browser, where the problem should be solved, I will never know.
IIRC ICO had rather strongly indicated that this would be the case. I'm not surprised, but let's face it -- even if they <i>did</i> enforce a fine it would almost certainly be so laughably small as to make it useless as a deterrent.
This law was half-baked from the start. I'd sooner see legislation requiring adherence to the Do Not Track standard. <a href="http://donottrack.us/" rel="nofollow">http://donottrack.us/</a>
Once again, this is non-news, only made into news because of the ongoing anti-EU FUD.<p>The basis of the EU directive is sound. Actually turning it into (enforceable) legislation is the hard part. Most regulatory bodies in the EU consider it an iterative process to be figured out in cooperation with the industry, and nobody is planning to start doling out fines in the near future.<p>However, the industry's arrogant attitude of doing fuck-all until the law comes down on them is not going to help. Lack of self-regulation and blatantly ignoring the principles of existing privacy laws is what triggered EU intervention in the first place.<p>Basically this whole scare mongering about bureaucratic "anti-cookie" laws is just a self-fulfilling prophecy.