[avian]

> It's pretty easy for the very small minority of people who don't want cookies to disable them in their browser.

No it's not. At least for Firefox, the cookie preferences feature has been neglected for years. It's hidden beyond an increasing number of clicks and has long standing bugs (for instance, my whitelist of sites I allow cookies from is wiped each time Firefox upgrades)

> Also it's pretty easy for any website that wants to track you, to track you using something other than cookies.

The specific law (details are slightly different in each European country) I'm familiar with concerns storing and processing identifying information. For various reasons, everybody focused exclusively on HTTP cookies, but tracking using, say, ETAGs would fall under the same requirement of notifying the users as far as I know.

[userbinator]

At least for Firefox, the cookie preferences feature has been neglected for years. It's hidden beyond an increasing number of clicks and has long standing bugs (for instance, my whitelist of sites I allow cookies from is wiped each time Firefox upgrades)

I think the fact that they're actually making it harder with each new UI revision - and trying to make it go away in some sense - is a sign that their interests are not aligned with those of their users' desire for privacy. It's not so surprising, really, as their revenue largely comes from an ad-supported search engine, and so they would not want to be defeating ad-networks' tracking by making cookie management/blocking easier...

[Karunamon]

That's not a really fair assumption - I recall the stated reason for this change (and the removal of another few checkboxes, like ones that disable javascript and images globally) is that idiot users would turn it off for some reason, and then complain that sites don't work right.

As much as I hate the idea of protecting people from themselves, there's some merit to this.

[NeutronBoy]

Or, they're not putting it front and centre because it's a feature only used by a limited number of (power) users, and generally only set once after install and never looked at again?

[mseebach]

It is easy, you're just doing it the wrong way.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ghostery/

[eueueu]

Sure, the law is ridiculous though. It'd be like trying to make it illegal for a shop assistant to remember you shopped there last thursday.

It's completely unenforceable.

[tripzilch]

> my whitelist of sites I allow cookies from is wiped each time Firefox upgrades

weird, I don't have that problem? (Firefox 38 Linux)