“You should analyse which cookies are strictly necessary and might not need consent. You might also use this as an opportunity to ‘clean up’ your webpages and stop using any cookies that are unnecessary or which have been superseded as your site has evolved.” [pdf]

Upshot: Strictly necessary cookies don’t require explicit user consent.

Which means, the EU e-Privacy Directive simply reduces the overall number of cookies dropped by websites. Unless there are suddenly teams of EU Auditors inspecting the business logic at every company around the world – it’s hard to imagine less tracking, less remarketing, less of what this was directive trying to minimize, going on.

It’s easy to imagine the tracking problem increasing and the remarketing efforts increasing and code the captures the data getting further buried into the business logic. All while, a smaller number of analytics companies with their ‘strictly necessary’ cookies grow even larger and are able to better profile/target individuals.