Originally Posted by ScottC
You are mixing up a few facts.
CLICKING on a banner and ending up on a site that might offer spyware doesn't make the cookie guilty, you are master of your own mouse. Even if you block all cookies then you'll still get ads and you can still click on ads.
As for an advertiser being able to track which ads you have been served not being useful, you obviously don't work in marketing
I have paid for ads, and host ads for clients, and the one thing all companies want is to know exactly how many people have seen the ad, when it was and where they came from. For customers and web users it's a good way of getting an even amount of different banners instead of the same stuff day in day out.
Tribalfusion uses their cookies to make money by selling ad space, and adware makers claim cookies are evil because that is the only way they can really convince many people that "cookies are evil".
Cookies have been around since 1994, they were never really considered nasty until the term spyware was introduced, and spyware scanners came to market, in late 2001.
And why should anybody care about what kind of banners the ad industry wants to push on us? There are so many simple ways to block them that many of us have never allowed them to clutter up our screens and almost never see any of them. From occasional use of unprotected systems, I have concluded that they rarely, if ever, add any value to my browsing sessions.
As for cookies, nowadays you do need them to perform certain tasks and to allow some sites to work properly, but IMHO there is really no point in allowing most of them to survive the session. Generally, only those carrying your ID for signing in at favorite sites are worth allowing to survive. I would say that many of us have been routinely cleaning out the cookie files since they started showing up in the mid-90s and are now quite happy with the cookie handling tool in Firefox, which saves one quite a lot of cookie cleanout duty.
We can also talk about popups (and their evil spawn, the popunder), which could have been a very useful and elegant technology but which has been so usurped by parasitic advertisers that there is almost no point in allowing them at all. When you get a site that doesn't seem to work, then you can choose whether to allow their popups or to go right over to a competitor that doesn't bother you with this kind of nonsense.