[oliveremberton]

Thanks! (I'm the founder of Silktide and author of that rant).

We had some constructive suggestions on what could be done instead, although these are definitely up for debate. The gist would be using a rel element like so:

<a href='privacy.html' rel='privacypolicy'>Privacy</a>

and then using that as a means of consistently linking to a privacy policy. As a result, policies would have consistent language for users ('look for the "Privacy" link') but could also be detected automatically by browsers or testing tools.

That way you could actually test your site is properly linking to a policy, and users could have browser preferences like "disable cookies until I've seen a policy" or whatever.

It's just an idea but we've implemented it on our sites and will be interested to see what others think:

http://blog.silktide.com/2012/09/fixing-a-broken-cookie-law/

[loceng]

Plus could then have a link to the privacy policy page added in the actual browser, rather than intruding on the user experience.

[jamiecurle]

That's a really nice solution that bridges responsibility between the user, browser and the website owners.