Most of you are probably disapointed in that this is not a thread about those circular tasty biscuits.

Anyhow, so I was doing my "once in a while browser cleanup" and damn, I had a lot of cookies. Thousands even. For pure interest mainly, I asked for notification everytime a cookie was made.

Every single advert, popup, you name it, tries to make cookies. While I realise that a lot of them are probably harmless (or even useful, like the massassi forum cookie!), a lot of them probably aren't. I'm not terribly happy with so many advertisements that just assume they can waste some of my hard drive space with a cookie file.

I was vaguely aware of how cookies were so easily made, but is there any way to restrict them to a site or creating some sort of script to delete all but the ones you allow?

I'm doing anything illegal, but it sure does inspire the paranoia in you to see all these "cookietrackerzcanseeeeyou.com" cookies in your browser.

adblock is good.

i think ad-aware and spybot have some way to find bad cookies and keep good ones.

Cookies are mostly harmless. I could be wrong, but it's not like a site can look at every cookie you have, just ones it specifies...

Anyway, I'm opposed to adblock... the internet depends on advertising to be free. Using Adblock to block all the adds is akin to piracy. Unless you can tell it to just block cookies...

yeah spybot is your friend

I think we need to have a plugin for adblock to allow certain "okayed" ad providers from serving ads. I agree with Vinny, but I also hate annoying blinking/game ads, and I think if we had a consumer group that had requirements from ads, we could agree to view those certified ads.

As for cookies: They're not that big.

It's not the size, just the principle. Especially when you set your browser to notify you, it's shocking how many are made.

A quick google search, wham, cookie, click on a site, wham, 6 cookies.

Talk about an abused technology. It's wasted too, it's not like that advert having a cookie on my PC will do them any good.

Uhm, not doing them any good? That way they know when you see that same advert or another advert from them again. It's their way of ensuring that if they get multiple views from one IP adress they can see if it was just one person seeing it several times or many people seeing it once. Incredibly usefull to get credible statistics.

In Konqueror I can set it to only allow cookies from certain domains. If an unknown site wants to set a cookie it asks me what to do with it in the future.