Update: I have split my original question into two to let each one be more cohesive.
According to EU Article 5(3) of the E-Privacy Directive (a.k.a 'The Cookie Laws'), web sites that target EU users have to gain opt-in consent from users before they set a cookie.
See ICO Guidence
I am trying to square this with Google Adsense on my web site.
I would imagine that Google Adsense can serve ads without having to set cookies.
However, I cannot find any info on this (on the Google sites/settings panels) about how to relay information about the 'state of consent' back to Google during a page request. So, my only option seems to be that I should not embed Google tag code at all if the user has not explicitly given consent. Which seems a bit drastic.
Letting my serverside script set a 'hasConsentedToCookies=FALSE' flag in the JavaScript tags would allow me to instruct Google's services to run in a gracefully degraded fashion.
Is there a setting on Google Adsense to suppress use of cookies for users that have not yet given consent?
If so, where can I find info on this?