Some interesting comments from a Symantec top bod. John Thompson is reported to have said that cookies are "are just as much an invasion of privacy as someone peering in my bedroom window" and that browser should ask permission before accepting any.

If I recall correctly it is actually possible to do this in Internet Explorer, and it was something I once tried in a fit of paranoia. What sticks in my mind is just how frustrating this quickly became as every website requrest permission to leave a cookie on my computer.

It's not just shopping sites or stored passwords but all sorts of analysis that website admins (myself included) use to try and understand traffic.

Of course, one solution is to make better use of the Internet Zones feature of Internet Explorer, effectively making a whitelist of sites that can be trusted to get on with storing information in cookies and not abuse the system.

Computeractive covered the topic in more detail in recent feature on cookies