Tom, Since you stopped engaging on Twitter I thought I would email you instead.

To say I was disappointed to see your comment on Twitter about the ePrivacy Directive cookie regs would be a huge understatement. I am big fan of MySociety and have been using your services for many years but to see your stance on Cookies is worrying. You think it is a waste of money and you state the reason is because it is a double fail, no consumer rights and a huge cost. OK so lets go from there. As Director of MySociety you had a choice on how you could implement the changes to PECR on MySociety web sites furthermore, you have a great deal of reach in the technical community throughout the UK (both Public and Private Sector) so you could have influenced how others implemented the changes. You didnt do this, you chose to ignore an opportunity to set the bar and expose the Information Commissioners guidance for the waste of words that it is. The changes to the Directive are very positive I personally fought for those changes for 3 years and I was very pleased to see them happen. The problem is not with the Directive or even the wording of the Directive the problem exists with ICO and the fact that they are suffering from overwhelming regulatory capture. They have colluded with external Government departments (DCMS) and private enterprise (Google, IAB), they have sacrificed their independence and produced guidelines requested by Big Data Inc.. Their guidelines are -not- compliant with either PECR or the ePrivacy Directive and they have made it very clear that they have no intention of commencing any serious enforcement action. What you should have done, was to set up MySociety and its web sites to fully comply with PECR and the ePrivacy Directive. You should have taken the line of seeking explicit consent for the use of cookies (including Google Analytics) and used your organisations considerable technical manpower and resources to shine as a beacon of how it -should- be done despite ICOs corrupt incompetence. MySociety has a responsibility not just to itself and the rest of the technical community, but also to your users and donors, to set the bar for online privacy. I would have been the first to sing your praises had you done so, I would have shouted it from the virtual rooftops. You didnt have to follow the path created by ICO, but you did and to make matters worse you then decided to tweet what basically amounts to Online Privacy is a waste of money. That is an insult to everything you stand for, your users, your donors and your charter. So, disappointed is far too weak a word to explain how I feel about your opinion, I would go so far as to say I am outraged and I will be filing a complaint with your board of trustees on this matter.

Regards, Alexander Hanff