I am a keen believer in law. It stops me being killed for my wallet while walking to the shop, keeps my house from being broken into while walking to said shop and my family safe.
So when a new law is passed - I do my best to comply. This one however, is ridiculous.
The EU Cookie law.
A law passed by the european union as a european directive. A directive to protect online users from cookies. The same cookies that make the web as we know it actually work.
So to get my site to adhere to the european law (which is slightly different depending on the EU country so I assume as I am not a solicitor and to be on the safe side that I need to abide by all variations). All I need to do is get informed consent from my website visitors before placing any cookies on their machine. It is important to note at this point that it's not just cookies from craigmayhew.com but also any cookies from third party services I use on my site (facebook buttons, twitter buttons, google analytics, google adsense... the list goes on).
So, all I need to do is prevent any anonymous google analytics data from being recorded, adverts displayed and twitter/facebook buttons from appearing until I have "implied consent" from the website user.
I could achieve complied consent by displaying a banner at the top (welcome back to the 90's!) asking the user to consent to cookies, deny cookies or continue anyway which would default to allowing cookies. Assuming they consent or continue then I can record anonymous google analytics data, display adverts and use twitter/facebook buttons, but only on the second page view.
Great - except 90% of my visitors only visit one page on my site. They find the exact page they need via Google, read the page, get the info and get out. So now I can't get advertising revenue from 90% of users?
Oh wait I could display a dialog to every first time visitor before content is loaded demanding they accept my cookies or leave. Yea that would keep the site profitable.
Thanks EU directive, good one.
In response I have removed all advertising, analytics and all share buttons. So on the upside you as the site user have slightly faster page loads, but with reduced functionality. The silver lining for me is that the site no longer makes any money and so I no longer have to worry about paying tax for it :)
EU Cookies