Fair enough!
But let's separate between session-specific analytics, and lifetime analytics.
As a person concerned about privacy, I don't care much about "your" analytics about click-through and how long I stay on your site and what I click and what not, this is session specific, and helps you with your business.
However, this should be possible with "one-day" cookies.
You don't need to know that I was on your site a week ago, and that I happen to leave your site with a full cart for some reason, or that the last banner with food did not work on me, so this time you'll try the car-banners.
So you think that MixPanel, KissMetrics, Google Analytics and all the other advanced analytic services provide no essential value to both the site owner and the public?
A/B tests last more than a session (if you return to the site 30 minutes later after doing some research, you want to see the same site, right?). Cohort analysis requires tracking how people use your website for months or years to see the effect of changes on long-term activity and customer retention. Simply tracking the effectiveness of your own advertising efforts (how many and which campaigns contributed to this sale? what's the lifetime value of a customer from this source?) requires multi-session tracking. Many purchases happen days or weeks after someone initially clicked an ad leading to your site.
Now it's possible to do some of that kind of analysis without cookies, but it requires you building and running all the tracking and reporting on your own server. To expect even a tiny fraction of the site owners that can currently plug into KissMetrics/MixPanel/Google Analytics/Optimizely/etc. to build out the same capabilities in house is absurd.
None of this has to do with serving customized ads to you, yet you are arguing that companies in the UK should not be able to do any of that, and they won't be at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world?
Sure, this would be a huge disadvantage. But that is no reason not to have a discussion about it. The HN community relys heavily on analytical services, and there is a bias against privacy advocates or anything that would bring change to how the web functions right now. The www does evolve, and some decisions from the past may have to be reverted.
Would such a change be difficult? Would it shift the burdon of analytics? Sure!
But be open minded: The real world is full of analytics, but for most of them you have to opt-in. When I go into a bank, I don't want the bank to know that I was rejected 10 times that same day somewhere else. I want a fair chance on my loan. I don't want my girlfriend to know that I browsed a webstore for some medication a week ago. Analytics provider could know all that. And they can reassure that they will not use that information, but the point here is to prevent the accumulation of it in the first place.
What would happen if someone would hack an analytics provider, and put all this stuff online? Type in an IP address, and I give you all I know about that IP adress. Nobody is doing it, because the data is anonymous, so it's hard to cash it in. But it certainly would destroy some lifes or marriages.
I believe the problem the legislator is trying to solve here it to prevent the crossreference that analytics- and ad-provider facilitate across different web-pages. And I believe this is a honorable goal.
Off topic: It used to be that your credit report was only updated every 24 hours so if you were denied credit at a bank your best bet would be to go to other banks that same day. I guess it's faster now though.
