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At 3:09 PM -0500 1/5/04, Strolia-Davis Christopher Contr MSG/MAT wrote:
>Right now the whole cookie issue is that people can use it to invade
>our privacy. It seems similar to the argument that a knife could be
>used to kill us. Should we prevent all knife sales? Should we ban
>the use of knives? That's ridiculous. We should punish people who
>use knives to kill.
No, privacy is *not* the whole cookie issue. It's certainly one
problem with cookies but it is not the only one, nor the one I am
primarily concerned with here. I only brought up privacy because one
of the other problems I noticed with the site was that it had no
privacy policy.
The real problem is that cookies are completely contrary to the web
architecture. They create resources that do not have URIs, and thus
cannot be bookmarked, linked to, and otherwise referenced. They
attempt to force state into a fundamentally stateless protocol with
disastrous results. Even if there were no privacy implications,
cookies would still be the wrong solution. Similarly, the fact that
other solutions also have privacy implications does not mean they are
as bad as cookies. Obviously I am giving up privacy when I choose to
type my name into a registration form, whether it's stored in a
cookie or something else. But there is no reason I should
simultaneously give up the ability to bookmark or link to a page as a
result of providing my name.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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