You can't fail to have noticed annoying prompts / pop-ups / flashing banners asking you to click to allow cookies appearing on many websites over the past few years. These were added as a consequence of an EU-wide law demanding this a few years back. We have covered what exactly a cookie is in a previous jargon busting blog.
While Brexit may or may not remove this requirement for the UK at some stage in the future, it appears that the EU lawmakers have seen sense and are planning to do away with this requirement anyway.
The (probably correct) suspicion is that users are now bombarded with these prompts so often that they just ignore them completely.
The new plan suggests that rather than consenting to cookies on every individual website, the websites will instead be able to consult the user's browser for this data. This is good news for most, although advertisers won't be happy that users can easily block their cookies globally.
The current timeline suggests this new approach will be in place by May 2018, although some are sceptical that it will be pushed through that quickly.