Must we dredge back up the old fashioned fear of cookies? It's one thing for people to know what they are and how they work - but they aren't just for spying on you and targeting ads. What's wrong with relevant ads, either? Anyway, cookies spare you from the trouble of logging in and enable personalization of all kinds of content. For example, my phone loses my cookies all the time and it drives me NUTS when I have to log in every time I go to Gmail or netvibes mobile. I LIKE cookies and it driven me nuts when people freak out about them. It's antiquated and silly, imho.

There are better ways to call for user control over our own data.