The EU cookie legislation is still mind blowing to me. In terms of widely used protocols with terrible designs it's up there with US payment card processing (want to make a $5 payment? Hand over the secret that gives the other party the ability to take an unlimited amount of money from you at any time in the next 4 years, and hope they don't misuse it).
Did no one involved in the cookie legislation think to run the idea by a technical expert before passing it? Why wouldn't they have done something like introduce an X-Allow-Tracking header in the http spec, and make the law require that sites respect that header instead of every site making their own cookie popup. Browsers could make that privacy setting as detailed as they want as far as which requests they included it with, and the EU could strongly recommend that everyone use browsers that they've approved as supporting that setting (or even force it in various ways, like require any OEM browser that ships with a device in the EU support that setting).
Did no one involved in the cookie legislation think to run the idea by a technical expert before passing it? Why wouldn't they have done something like introduce an X-Allow-Tracking header in the http spec, and make the law require that sites respect that header instead of every site making their own cookie popup. Browsers could make that privacy setting as detailed as they want as far as which requests they included it with, and the EU could strongly recommend that everyone use browsers that they've approved as supporting that setting (or even force it in various ways, like require any OEM browser that ships with a device in the EU support that setting).