EU Cookie Law: Will it be Beneficial for the E-Business

Before dwelling on the EU Cookie Law, let's get the right meaning of the term cookie. A cookie is a small widget, not actually a program, which has been prepared by the website, and is placed in the browser that you use for surfing the web. Now, you must be speculating, as to why the websites build these cookies and save it on our browser's workspace. The answer is, cookies are used as a behavior analysis tool, which is used by website developers and business houses to study the behavior of the surfers, so as to prepare the website in such a fashion that will attract the surfers and increase the website traffic.

It is also used for storing the preferences of the surfers like what ad they had clicked on, which will help the website developers as well as owners to determine as to what type of ads must be placed on the website, which is of the interest of constant surfers of the particular website etc.. Now, all what has been transpired is some ignoramus lot and a group of armchair web thinkers have been clamoring about the privacy needs of the netizens. And, they have conveniently targeted the cookies for 'invading' the privacy of the web users and for 'allegedly accessing' the private data of the web surfers. For all such reasons, the EU has defined an EU Cookie Directive with effect from May 26, 2012, in UK and Europe.

This means, all the companies of UK and Europe that are having their websites will have to take prior consent from the website surfers, so as to allow the website to save the surfer's data in the form of cookies. It means, either a user would opt-in for getting cookies from a particular website, or the user would opt-out of getting cookies saved in their personal system from a website. If the web surfer opts-out then the entire e-business of the particular website would go kaput.

This is profoundly frustrating for the website developer, because if there won't be any cookies saved then the website developers cannot work toward enhancing the experience of the surfer when he/she pays a next visit to the website. The EU Cookie Law has made a slew of UK website developers to wring their hands. Since, if they do not solicit the request of the web surfer to save the cookies, they would be imposed a gargantuan fine. Now, time would only tell as to what will be the effect of such legislation on the commercial e-world.