Thanks guys for sharing you thoughts on this topic. I'll certainly write comments about all your letters. At first concerning Marc's letter. > I asume that the background of this law is the posibility to avoid obscure > ways to follow the user across his navigation throught different websites. Yes, I agree with you. This is "users anti-tracking" law, concerning users privacy and it's a part of EU e-Privacy Directive. The idea to protect users privacy can be considered as good, but the methods, with which EU officials try to implement it, is very questionable. > I think this law will not be useful for the european people, this is just another way to repress and control people and initiatives. I also don't see any benefits for European people (comparing with all problems from this law). I haven't wrote my own position and concentrated on the law itself and it's relation with security. But by myself, I don't like this law :-). So I understand opinion of people from EU. By myself I haven't worried about this law, because it didn't concerned me (but it concerns a lot of people, particularly in EU, so I'm worry about them). Because I've a lot of laws in Ukraine to worry about, and regularly new laws are creating, which have different impacts (including bad impacts, even officially they are good laws) on web sites and freedom in Internet. For example, recently I've wrote new article on this topic, which will be posted in June's issue of PenTest Auditing & Standards. In which I've wrote as concerning EU Cookie Law (about which I've wrote in my post to the list), as about Ukrainian Euro 2012 Law. And concerning the last law I've wrote an example of closed site (and the company itself) during "the road to the Euro 2012" - because of violation of the law. And that violation was artificially created by police, i.e. law enforcements abused the service to force it to break the law and to have legal motives for their actions (closing of the site and the company). This is very interesting case, about which you'll can read in my new article. > For my techy background I think this law comes from the ignorance of our > legislators. Creating waste of time and money for changing sites, reducing usability and user experience at web sites, exposing owners of web sites - all these aspects of this law makes it look not well-thought-out. Legislators should always ask tech-people, before creating any laws which concerns technologies - and it's normal for parliaments to conduct such expert consultations. The questions are only the next: did EU legislators did such consultations and did they took experts recommendations into account. Concerning the topic of fining and closing web sites. Recently I've found interesting case of such legislative actions in USA, which exactly fit into my series of articles and I'll tell you about it soon. Best wishes & regards, MustLive Administrator of Websecurity web site http://websecurity.com.ua [WEB SECURITY] Closing web sites due to legislation Marc Palau marc at palaueb.com Tue Jun 5 06:48:24 EDT 2012