I’ve just been browsing a few political party websites and came across one of the most humorously silly things I’ve read about the EU in a long time.
The UK Indpendence Party, a party that wants the UK to extricate itself from the EU, has compared the Union to a Sesame Street character. Seriously.
This is what they had to say:
The European Parliament is showing its clear divorce from the real world once again in a bid to regulate internet cookies, according to UKIP Leader Nigel Farage.
“This desire to write rules for everything, to control every aspect of the peoples’ lives, leads them to propose insanity after insanity.
“The latest stupidity is their confusion over ‘cookies’. The things that tell your web browser to show Google in your language, Yahoo for your country, fills in the Amazon preferences that you have,” Farage continued.
“Alexander Alvaro MEP wants you to give your permission for such cookies to be placed upon your computer: But we’ve all already given such permissions by signing up to these services.
“This is just another example of the monstrous arrogance of the political elite. In their eyes no one is capable of dealing with the modern world without their, ahem, aid.
“The reality is that none of us need some young shaver of a politician to make life more difficult for us. If we don’t want cookies then we’ll clear our browser caches of them as adults do and can and we really, seriously, do not need some fool out to make his name before the upcoming elections to make our life more difficult for us, thank you very much.”
Maybe the EU should use UKIP’s jibe as inspiration for the parliamentary elections. Vote for the Cookie Monster definitely has a certain ring to it…
(8 votes, average: 3.38 out of 5)
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*sigh*
Yes, browser cookies are exactly the sort of thing the EU is supposed to legislate, because nobody else will (or rather, nobody else is big enough to make the corporations listen).
If this is the most noteworthy gripe about the EU that the UKIP can come up with, they should just disband now - it’s pretty obvious they are incapable of representing the eurosceptic electorate with any conviction.
Yet again, in a rush to criticize the EU, UKIP have demonstrated their ignorance of the issuea. The issue is not the cookie Google or Amazon put on your browser (first party cookies), it’s the ones that 3rd parties advertisers embedded in multiple websites for the explicit purpose of building a profile on you (third party coookies).
When third party cookies started being used, most people didn’t even know that this was happening - it’s not as if these companies went out of their way to be known by the public. They thought they were visiting Google, nobody told them they were visiting Double-click and other third party advertisers at the same time.
Should the EU legislate this? Absolutely not. But it would be nice if UKIP demonstrated they know what they are talking about for a change.
Should the EU legislate this? Absolutely not.
Why not? The industry consensus appears to be that 3rd party cookies are tantamount to malware. Every consumer PC scan package tags them for removal. They provide no benefit to the user. This is exactly the sort of situation where the EU should exert its power to stop shady business behaviour.