Cookies – the new law really takes the biscuit
The government has given companies until 26 May 2012 to comply with the new EU's Privacy and Communications Directive which requires the user's consent before using cookies. This could open up a hornet's nest of problems and could potentially make websites a lot less useful and user-friendly.
So what exactly is a cookie? It's a small file placed on your PC by a website that they can retrieve each time you visit pages on the site. It is not dangerous and cannot harm your PC and it can only be used by the web domain that stored it in the first place.
Let me give you an example from one of our websites. The World Malaria Day website (http://www.worldmalariaday.org) has an option at the top to view the site in French. If you click on this flag, the website stores a cookie on your PC that holds the information saying that your language preference is French. The next time you visit the site, this cookie is retrieved and the site is automatically shown to you in French. Without this convenience you would have to click on the flag every time you visited in order to see the site in French – not very user-friendly at best.

Without wishing to confuse matters, there is another type of cookie which is non-persistent and which expires when you leave a site. These are called session cookies and are strictly necessary to hold web pages together. For example, if you have entered a password to access a site then every page you go to on that site needs to know that you have logged in and are able to view it. It can check a session cookie to do this. Without it, each page you went to would say "sorry we don't know who you are – go away!".
A similar thing might be used to keep your basket contents when shopping. Not being able to track this would be like having a supermarket basket with the bottom missing. Every time you put something in, it would immediately fall out again and your basket would remain forever empty.
A bigger impact will be felt if third party applications such as Google Analytics have to get permission to use cookies. If people are able to opt out then the reporting you are getting about your website visitors will be less accurate and therefore you will be less able to make informed decisions about your marketing. Will there be an alternative technological approach that can be adopted? It seems a wait and see approach is what is generally being recommended in the hope that analytics companies will come up with a solution.
As far as our sites are concerned, the majority just use the necessary session cookies but we will be carrying out a review and implementing changes where necessary.

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So I had to gently break the news that we couldn't actually use these images on the website. The client of course asked why. The simple answer is - Google Images is not a free stock library.
The system we used was made by a company called Autographix and it used an Apple IIe as its main computer allied to a graphics box which was the size of a large desktop computer. The Apple had no hard disk, just 3 x 5¼ inch floppy disk drives, two that were responsible for the system and one that stored the files we were producing. Each disk had a capacity of 360Kb. You would need 22,000 of these to store everything on my phone.