That's not entirely true. If I'm not mistaken, a difference is made between two types of cookies; functional cookies and non-functional cookies. You can place functional cookies on your website without any further notice. However, for non-functional cookies you'll have to ask permission.david63 wrote: I admit that I do not know the precise details for all EU countries and in your case you may be right but my understanding is, for all EU countries, that if the site uses cookies in any way whatsoever then you have to ask for the user's permission to store them.
Functional cookies are cookies used for a session-id, marking topics as read, and saving other information that are needed to serve the user.
Non-functional cookies are things like tracking cookies, e.g. cookies that do not directly contribute to serving the user, and are primarily meant to provide information to companies.
It could also be that this was the dutch-specific setup, but as the dutch setup was supposed to be far more restrictive than the european norm, I guess this also holds for most of europe.