For the past couple of years, EU and U.S. negotiators have been feuding over Europe's data protection directive, which empowers regulators to halt the flow of personal information to countries they judge lack adequate data protection arrangements. Although spam can be annoying, it can also be a useful low-cost marketing tool, allowing small businesses to connect with otherwise unreachable customers. Most people simply won't be willing to make the extra effort that opting in requires. At best the spam ban would be superfluous, since rapidly improving filtering software already allows customers to make their own choices about what types of e-mail they want to receive. But if regulating spam will hurt only some European e-businesses, restricting cookies will handicap them all.
Cookies are digital tags that are saved to an Internet user's computer.
Among other uses, these tiny files are used to keep track of online shopping carts and record how many times a user sees a certain advertisement. They also help Web sites identify when a regular visitor has returned, so that the visitor need not re-enter his identification information every time or see the same ads repeatedly. European online advertisers would be devastated by a cookie ban. We want to know who is looking at what on the Web. While European privacy laws impose draconian restrictions on the private sector, governments can get away with nearly anything.