The last place I worked was a Swiss organization that built web sites for the European Commission. Dealing with the EU cookies directive was an amazing waste o

The last place I worked was a Swiss organization that built web sites for the European Commission. Dealing with the EU cookies directive was an amazing waste of brain cells for everyone on the team. For instance, were we allowed to ignore it because we were Swiss (non-EU)? If not, which version of the law were we required to comply with? For instance, the UK implementation of the law says that you can assume "implied" consent if the user ignores your popup altogether. However, the Dutch version of the law is much stricter - the user must click "I accept" before you can save any cookies. And the French version of the law allows for lots of exceptions, e.g. for setting the user's preferred language. Plus, we needed a cookie just to store whether or not the user clicked "yes" or "no," so in effect we were forced to break the law no matter what we did. (The only alternative would be to show the "no" users the popup every time they came back to the site, since we were supposed to forget that they had even clicked "no"...) So all in all, it was a huge mess. In the end we just copy-pasted a JQuery plugin from GitHub and chose the strictest setting. Now our site is uglier, it's more confusing to users, and we still have to cross our fingers that we didn't miss a corner case in Bulgaria or something.