Amazon, for one, will remember who you are as soon as you log in, whether or not you have a single cookie saved. I know this for certain as I just logged in using a brand-new, just installed less than a half hour ago, browser on a brand-new, set up earlier today, account, on brand-new, delivered and set up in Mint this morning, hardware. No cookies or other bumf in sight, at least not until I went to Amazon and signed in. I'd say that any ecommerce site which can't keep track of your account without using cookies on your system is one you really shouldn't be using. What the cookies do is to keep track of _you_; if I kill tracking cookies and the like, then Amazon has no clue about what I do when I'm _not_ on their site. They can and will see everything that I do on their site, but it's THEIR SITE. If I log into another site using the same login, and if that site has an agreement with Amazon, then Amazon can see what I did there, too, and the other site can see what I did on Amazon. So I use different logins. Without tracking cookies et al Amazon would have to put effort into tracking me, where 'effort' is spelled 'money', and the rate of return for that is too small for them to bother. (Google would be a whole different matter, but there are ways to deal with them, too.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
