How the cookie poisoned the Web - Doc Searls Weblog

Doc Searls lays a lot of problems on the cookie.

This, however, was not the original idea, which Lou Montulli came up with in 1994. Lou’s idea was just for a server to remember the last state of a browser’s interaction with it. But that one move—a server putting a cookie inside every visiting browser—crossed a privacy threshold: a personal boundary that should have been clear from the start but was not.

Once that boundary was crossed, and the number and variety of cookies increased, a snowball started rolling, and whatever chance we had to protect our privacy behind that boundary, was lost.

Today that snowball is so large that nearly all personal agency on the Web happens within the separate silos of every website, and compromised by whatever countless cookies and other tracking methods are used to keep track of, and to follow, the individual.

He is correct that the cookie enabled many of these negatives. He's also ignoring that the cookie enabled amazing web applications and incredible experiences on the web. All in, I think the cookie is still a good thing and I’m glad we have a web that is built with it. This is another example of a technology being neutral, but what it enables can be positive or negative.