How many of you have ever been a victim of a cookie privacy issue? How many cases in the whole world do you know? How many of them are related to non porn websites?
I see 2 issues here. The biggest one is that there are a lot of website owners that don't even now their websites are placing cookies as adding the Google Analytics tracking code to his website will do just that. And by the way, that is not Google collecting data about you but the website owner. The cookie is a first party cookie and legally Google has no write to use that data.
The next issue is that without cookies people will not be able to optimize their websites anymore. Simple tasks like a/b testing which is the most affordable way of improving a website won't happen anymore... cause yes, they are based on cookies. Not all websites have money to invest in user testing which anyway proove to be much less efficient than a/b testing or multivariate testing for that matter.
And all of you smart ass devs or admins, tell me, can your server log files point me out how often I've visited your website last month, which referrer I used for each visit and how much revenue I brought you? Than after you get me this data please apply the revenue to the first referrer and build me a report on which referrer works best for my website so I know where to put my marketing money for the next month. Yes, a cookie can do all that.
As for privacy, done right, a cookie can't tell nothing about a certain visitor that will affect his privacy concerns. But yes, I guess it is too expensive for EU to fight the criminals who exploit cookies so, hell, lock'em all down.
