Fancy a 90% drop in enthusiasm from your site visitors? This amazing offer could be yours thanks to a wonderful new law about cookies from EU regulators. Yes folks, the people who brought you regulations about the bend in a banana are back!

The new law applies to all EU websites and requires website owners to get a user’s consent before cookies are saved onto a device.

Guess what that means? It means putting something like this on your site:

This is exactly what the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has done on its own site. Thus over 90% of site visitors have declined to accept a Google Analytics cookie, thereby disappearing from their analytics, writes marketing site Chinwag. Awesome!

Of course this is bound to impact site traffic, massively.

Prior to this, site owners just had to provide users with information about how the cookies were used and explain how to ‘opt-out’ if they objected, usually in Terms and Conditions. Under the new rules, cookies can only be stored on devices where the user has given their consent. The UK’s Information Commissioner has actually recommended this be incorporated into UK law.

The web industry in the EU has a year to work out what how to implement this law.

The graphs obtained by leading web analytics expert, Vicky Brock (@brockyvick), under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.