Cookies, do they infringe my rights?
 

Seriously.

I can understand sites having cookies, like subsim so I don't have to type in my password everytime, but why is it I go to a site eg a news site and everyone under the sun wants to set a cookie? I reject most btw.

I mean why does some site have to try and set a cookie that won't expire until 2038?

I know google tries to and does, and I know they use the information that in many way I feel is none of their business.

It bugs the hell out of me and I sure wish I could find a legal challenge to cookies.

One more question. If someone has their web browser set to allow cookies, ie a novice who takes vanilla settings, is the loading of cookies without warning them not illegal? Or is it like junk mail, nothing you can do about it?

I have my Firefox set to alert me every time a site tries to set a cookie, I reject a great deal like you do. I know it's a pain to always click "Deny" each time I visit a new site, but well worth it. I can count on two hands the number of cookies set in my PC, never more. I do not want to help them gather info, for good or bad... ;)

It's the way they do it, but less time is good too. Good coders never do that, they make it expire at the end of the session, but you can't do that for everything, for example a forum.

And you do good to block it...

Well, like you said yourself, some are good, so in general it's a good thing they exist, anyway from my point of view, being a web coder (novice coder that is :88) ).

It's not illegal, but it's better not to let them set those cookies. Some cookies are designed to report your moves within a network of websites, which is wrong if you ask me. It's none of their business and they could easily find another way. But cookies, for them, are a good way because the info is stored on your PC, not in their memory or database. Which for some site, the number of visitors is counted by the millions each week, so imagine if cookies did not exist to store those bits of info.

I am not sure that you have any legal standing.

No. Wait. I'm wrong. You don't have any legal standing. I'd argue this in front of any judge based on:

1. Surfing the internet is a voluntary activity.
2. You have no identifiable damages, and therefore any claim for damages.
3. When you visit a website, you allow that site to put a cookie up, basically, by visiting.
4. Nothing is 'illegal' until a governing body says that it is so, and last I checked, Congress has not passed, and the President has not signed, any bill making it illegal to put a little thinginy in your Internet files tracking your presence on websites.
5. There isn't, despite what Justice Brennan liked to think, a right to privacy that exists in the penumbras of the Constitution, and hopefully the ones that he penciled in will dissappear before long.
6. The Constitiution does not protect people from each other, only from the government itself.
7. The long standing principal, caveat emptor, still exists, and I think should, when it comes to surfing the internet.

This certainly, isn't very deep legal thinking, but must the judges I know would buy into it, I believe.....