Mossberg has a very good column in Thursday's WSJ which deals with tracking cookies and their very close correlation to spyware. He is very against the fact that the industry has succesfully pressure Microsoft to remove tracking deletion from their antispyware program.
Suppose you bought a TV set that included a component to track what you watched, and then reported that data back to a company that used or sold it for advertising purposes. Only nobody told you the tracking technology was there or asked your permission to use it.You would likely be outraged at this violation of privacy. Yet that kind of Big Brother intrusion goes on every day on the Internet, affecting millions of people. Many Web sites, even from respectable companies, place a secret computer file called a "tracking cookie" on your hard disk. This file records where you go on the Web on behalf of Internet advertising companies that later use the information for their own business purposes. In almost all cases, the user isn't notified of the download of the tracking cookie, let alone asked for permission to install it.
In the end he argues that sites should alert users to tracking cookies and explain the benefits giving them a clear choice to turn them off or on.
