Originally Posted by Darren
Read the article carefully and you will see that it says exactly what John (and Scott and, now, I) said. Double click can access cookies that it plants. In other words, Doubleclick cannot access a cookie set by Flyertalk. But it can access a cookie that it sets through Flyertalk. Because DC is so pervasive on the web, it has a lot of info about people's surfing habits because it's able to set a lot of cookies. Personally, I couldn't care less but that's just me. Good Housekeeping's advertisers know what its readers will buy and tracks it religiously just like Playboy's advertisers know what its readers will buy. I care much more about Tribalfusion which has a much sketchier record for its use of javascript. You want to be afraid of something, start looking at the power of Java and Javascript, not at cookies.
Understood. but edit to say that "by" or "through" FlyerTalk is meaningless since by omission or comission FlyerTalk enables DoubleClick cookies.
What I'm saying is that DoubleClick can track your movements across the net. Other companies can arrange to share data about users behavior. You don't even have to set a cookie to do that.
In the grand scheme of things cookies may be down in the noise, but they are not entirely harmless either.
That said, I personally don't block cookies. I do opt-out of web tracking sites.