Question of the Fortnight
Will the EU finally kill off cookie-consent pop-ups?
Officials want to eliminate one of the internet’s biggest annoyances
EU lawmakers might finally be waking up to what many people realised years ago – that cookie-consent pop-ups are one of the worst things to have happened to the internet.
They were never meant to be, of course. Back in 2009 the revised e-Privacy Directive was hailed as a landmark law protecting your rights online. It was designed to stop websites tracking your activities without permission and give you more control over what personal data they stored. What wasn’t to like?
But even then some experts warned the policy was so excessive it would lead to users being barraged by endless cookie-consent notifications. And so it has proved.