in a vote on electronic data collection and privacy the european parliament has been showing that it doesn’t understand usability on the web:

if the vote is ratified, web sites will have to explicitly ask users if they want to accept cookies—a move that the advertising industry says could be damaging to business. ignoring the red herring of the advertising industry falling on it’s face, which won’t happen, my problem here is that i think this functionality should be part of web browser software and not left up to individual website programmers to implement.

sensible web browsers already allow you to set preferences for which cookies you accept. typical settings are “accept all”, “deny all” and “ask me each time”. netscape 6 and opera certainly allow you to do this. netscape 4 doesn’t and i expect the major problem is that the most widely used browser internet explorer 5 doesn’t (though i haven’t got it handy to check). what this possible legislation means is that you will be forced into an “ask me for each website” preference.

compared to the number of websites in europe there are a really really *really* small number of web browsers. it’d be much simpler for there to be an eu standard on cookies that web browsers could claim support for. browsers that allow you to see cookies as they arrive and accept or deny them as you see fit would claim support for the standard.

i suppose it would become illegal to commercially provide browsers that didn’t support the standard just as it’s illegal to sell toys that don’t meet eu standards. there are undoubtedly problems with this approach but i think that they’re minimal compared with those associated with the approach of putting the onus of responsibility onto individual site owners.

it’s not that it’s hard as a web programmer to ask someone whether they mind you sending them cookies, it’s that i think it’d be a pain in the arse for the user. if someone says yes to cookies then you can store that preference in a cookie and never ask again. if someone says no you’d have to ask every time you possibly wanted to send them a cookie. the people who don’t want cookies would be inconvenienced the most, just as they are at the moment. [found via rebecca’s pocket]