About 3 years ago (as I write this) the European Union (EU) decided (for reasons that escape me) to require all websites who wish to do business with EU citizens to announce that they use cookies — assuming that they use cookies. Problem with this is: all websites use cookies (statistically speaking, at least), and cookies are harmless. Completely. Totally.
What’s a cookie? It’s teeny weeny bit of data (a few hundred characters, tops) a website is allowed to store on your machine, such as when you click on an option a cookie might be created to keep that setting for you so that you don’t have to click that option again next time you visit the site. No other website can read it; and its only the data that website itself put there. Even the website that created the cookie can only access it when you again visit that website. Never go there again? That website can never see that cookie. There’s no identity theft possible; there are no [known] security holes with cookies.
The irony here is that the very announcement, which you are required to acknowledge (in order to make it go away) creates a cookie on your machine! You click on it, and the next time you go there that announcement does not pop up. Right? How come? Because there’s now a cookie for that website on your computer proclaiming that you have already acknowledged use of cookies on that website. It’s possible that this message is even the only time the website will use a cookie. Irony… But then legislators are like that.
So why did the EU do this? As a 40+ year veteran computer engineer, frankly I have no idea. As a student of international politics, however, I surmise that it was the EU flexing its muscles internationally. Whether that was conscious or unconscious I couldn’t tell you (and groups, corporations and governments are just as capable of doing things for consciously hidden reasons as is an individual — does that scare you? It should!). If it unconscious I still can’t think of the justification (the surface, public, advertised reason for doing this) though it was probably something about security and user safety, though, as I said, that doesn’t hold up.
The end result is a massive, planetary change in how websites seem to work, and massive inconvenience perpetrated on all internet users, an increase in the number of cookies on your computer(s), and an increase in anxiety about what cookies are and can do, by those who don’t actually know what a cookie (99.999% of all computer users, that is). There is no positive, up-side to this requirement by the EU that I can find.
Mostly I ignore the “click here to acknowledge that we use cookies” message, just as my own personal silent protest to nonsense. It’s a harmless message, though, as I said, clicking on it most certainly creates a cookie on your computer (though the website likely had one or more there already), perhaps for no better reason than to record that you acknowledge cookies. Alas and alack…