The global influence of the EU’s cookie laws is due for a revamp later this year.

Cookies hold visitor information for websites and are crucial for some basic functions, like remembering your username. But they can also be a privacy nightmare. Your data gathered by these cookies can be sold to third-party companies and used for targeted advertising.

To deal with the murky implications of cookies, the European Union enacted a sweeping cookie law in 2009, based on a previous privacy directive. With this new law, websites had to ask European visitors for consent to use cookies. Many companies have switched their systems to include consent pop-ups for users worldwide, rather than creating separate European versions of their sites, so it has also affected Americans.

Although the aim was to g

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