EU

The most popular interpretation of the cookies directive is that websites should warn about cookies that are not essential for the operation of the websites. For instance, a cookie set to keep the items in your shopping cart is essential for the operation of an online shop and users should not be warned. If the cookie is set to track user activity for marketing purposes (e.g. by Google Analytics for targeting ads) — that's not essential, and the user should be warned.

The main website of the European Commission sets cookies to store information on surveys. This is not essential to the operation of the website, so technically they should warn about it. Bit they do not. OK. that's a small problem, they are almost clean… on sufrace.

If you look a little bit further, you'll see that parts of ec.europa.eu set Google Analytics cookies for the whole ec.europa.eu domain. For instance, EURES homepage sets Google Analytics cookies __utma, __utmb, __utmc and __utmz for everything at ec.europa.eu, as well as a couple of other cookies for itself,  such as eures_client_nr and piwiki_visitor, as well as a EURES_SESSIONID.

European Parliament	5540
European Council and Council	3117
European Commission	24617
Court of Justice of the European Union	1547
Court of Auditors	752
European Economic and Social Committee	689
Committee of the Regions	488
European Ombudsman	22
European Data Protection Supervisor	43
European External Action Service	1667

It's not obvious to find these numbers in the budget, so we'll have to use a hack. EU permanent staff pays 10.25% of their salaries to the pension fund. Pension contributions are accounted for as revenue, so they are consolidated the section 4 1 0 here. For 2012, pension contributions were at 483mln euros. By means of a simple extrapolation, we can now evaluate the amount paid in salaries to 4.7 bln euros, i.e. 6.5% of the EU budget. With the number of permanent position at 38 482, this gives an average of ~122 000 euros/year salary.

Naturally, the distribution of income is rather unequal at the instititions, with high earners being paid 7 times more that low earners (18 370 vs 2 654 euros/months base salary)

Our super-duper high-tech IT-savvy EU commissionner Neelie Kroes messed up EU-Azerbaijan relations recently, first claiming that the computers of her collbarators were hacked during an official visit to Baku, then silently sending the two people involved in the accusation on holidays.

It looks like the two "collaborators" of Neelie Kroes stumbled upon the "suspicious activity" popup window while connecting to their email accounts from Azerbaijan.