Those aren't web site design issues, they're truth-in-advertising and business practice issues, which apply to all forms of advertising and business.
I'm talking about technical and design issues, like requiring every web site in the EU to pop up a stupid banner while you're trying to read something that blocks the content just to say, "Hey! We use cookies! Got it?" Now imagine taking that to the next level, with pages of regulations saying where and how other form elements must be laid out on the screen. Imagine another banner popping up on every EU web site saying, "Hey! Here's the link to our privacy policy! Got it?" Then clicking that away stores a cookie, which pops up the cookie banner... All because some bureaucrat who doesn't even know what an HTTP cookie is wrote a regulation requiring everyone on the whole continent to acquiesce to the bureaucrat's ignorance so he can claim to be pro-consumer and privacy-conscious and get reelected.
> I'm talking about technical and design issues, like requiring every web site in the EU to pop up a stupid banner while you're trying to read something that blocks the content just to say, "Hey! We use cookies! Got it?"
When I worried about the impact of the the EU cookie directive I read it. Surprisingly, it only requires Cookie notifications for web sites that use cookies for purposes that are not strictly necessary for the web site to function. This means that the operators of web pages that show cookie notifications are probably spying on their users for advertising (or other) purposes. The EU cookie directive only makes this obvious.
I think EU politicians know what cookies are and how they are used. You can see that in the list of cookies exempt from consent:
• session IDs
• authentication cookies
• user-centric security cookies
• session-limited multimedia player cookies
• social network cookies (for logged in members of the social network)
I'm talking about technical and design issues, like requiring every web site in the EU to pop up a stupid banner while you're trying to read something that blocks the content just to say, "Hey! We use cookies! Got it?" Now imagine taking that to the next level, with pages of regulations saying where and how other form elements must be laid out on the screen. Imagine another banner popping up on every EU web site saying, "Hey! Here's the link to our privacy policy! Got it?" Then clicking that away stores a cookie, which pops up the cookie banner... All because some bureaucrat who doesn't even know what an HTTP cookie is wrote a regulation requiring everyone on the whole continent to acquiesce to the bureaucrat's ignorance so he can claim to be pro-consumer and privacy-conscious and get reelected.
You want more of that?