imagine some people started using hammers as weapons, leading to some gruesome murders vividly depicted by the news. as a result, construction companies started advertising that this house was built without the use of ANY hammers. that's how I feel about cookies.

cookies are not the problem. spyware is the problem. the way cookies work is, the server includes a "SET-COOKIE" header in its response. it is literally a request, which has no power, other than your computer deciding to store the data locally and include the cookie as a header in its subsequent requests.

somehow instead of us collectively relying on our own user agents to not comply with requests from remote servers that are not in our interest, we settled on deciding the cookie itself is a dangerous mechanism, which is stupid.