[gozo]

"the poor execution of a good idea (take the EU privacy directive that forces the opt-in for cookie tracking. This has in its execution by Google etc. generally become more of an annoyance than a privacy feature)"

That's because Google rather have these annoying notices than make it easy to disable tracking. The EU did the right thing in leaving it up to the industry how to solve these problems, it's just that the industry doesn't want to.