Michael Ross, Director, ecommerce platform eCommera
The EU cookie law - What a farce!
How many websites are there in the UK? 10, 20, 30 Million? Who can possibly police that lot? If Amazon.co.uk is treating the law with disdain then why on earth would the rest of us be interested in doing anything to comply with it?
Every commercial site on the planet uses cookies just to transact a shopping cart. I would argue that one of the essentials for any good webmaster who wants to improve his customer experience and website is to know where his customer has come from, which search terms have been used and how they interact with the website, and to do that I need cookies.
How much money will be wasted on enforcing the unenforceable, and to what purpose? Are we in a recession where money is tight? I think if it was my money (oh, I'm sorry - I'm a taxpayer so it is my money) I'd be able to find better ways to spend it.
What a farce - Brian Rix would be proud of it."
John Sollars, MD, at printer ink retailer, Stinkyink
Implementing a complex and loosely defined EU directive
The ICO were stuck between a rock and a hard place with this - they were charged with implementing a complex and loosely defined EU directive and have done their best to make this achievable for businesses. It would have been great for them to have given this sort of guidance earlier but at the same time one can understand the challenges that they faced in giving definitive advice without legal precedent.
At the end of the day we've always seen the implementation of this law as reflecting common sense and best practice. If you have a solid policy in place and an opt-in channel that you believe gives consumer a real choice then it was always going to be likely that you'd meet the spirit of the law. The challenge for companies has been, and in many cases remains, putting these solutions in place technically without incurring significant costs or complexity.
We think that there's a lot of smaller businesses out there that could struggle with the requirements of this law so that why we've built out free Cookie Consent tool that lets site owners quickly add a tested compliance solution to their site without the need for time-consuming and costly bespoke development."
Graham Cooke, CEO, of tag management business Qubit
