Chris

I know. But that will be down to poor web design. The cookie control pop-up hinders user engagement with any website, and worse, it does so on the all-important first visit, when first impressions count. Once a few sites ditch it, it will leave the rest looking clunky. Even a few extra seconds wait time is an eternity on the web. There’s no technical reason why site operators can’t remove the UK from whichever geoblocking system they use to prevent EU users from seeing the website without first acknowledging the cookie control pop-up. After the law changes, and it gets inevitable publicity in UK media, I think lots of places will ditch it.

On a related issue, by the way, the real benefits of these reforms aren’t in the removal of cookie pup-ups, they are in relaxing the absurd administrative burden currently put upon even small charities and community groups who already barely have the resources to manage simple members/supporters lists and have to have reams of policies just to ensure such things aren’t shared by the wrong email address or even stored on the wrong cloud service, and to inform the data commissioner when even an extremely trivial data ‘breach’ occurs.

It has been rather annoying sitting in more than one context and witnessing the chaos it has caused, especially in situations where things are being run by volunteers. I won’t be sorry to see the back of as much of that as possible.