Comment A few bad uses = all bad? (Score 2, Interesting) 447
There seems to be an assumption that cookies are almost entirely used for evil tracking of website visitors. People have brought up shopping carts and logins, but there are many, many other relatively minor uses for which cookies are useful. Are we to provide you with a disclaimer every time we want to make sure some little setting that you have clicked "sticks" as you jump between pages? Yes, there are other tools to do this job, but cookies are also a specific tool for a specific job.
I find it interesting to hear many people claim the evils of cookies are so bad that they need to be outlawed, when in the end, it is the user's choice if they want to accept them. Isn't this akin to saying that we need to ban content on television or the internet because sometimes it could be used for evil? If you can use the argument of "just turn the channel" or "just don't go to those websites" in those cases, then why isn't the same argument good for people to just turn off cookies? If enough people do that, then the web developers will use a different tool to get the job done, and cookies will fall by the wayside. You have an "off" button on your cookies. If you don't like them, then use it.