Spam Legislation

In Australia, we're lucky to have one of the more strict anti-spam laws in place.  The Australian Federal Spam Act 2003 is one of the few "Opt In" pieces of legislation world wide.  In the USA, their CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 allows for anyone to send unsolicited commercial email, however they must comply with a request to opt out of future unsolicited emails.  In Australia, you are not allowed to send unsolicited commercial email except under a very few strict conditions and even then there is a legislative requirement to still have a functional "Opt Out" link in each email.

Cookies

In contrast to the media hype surrounding the use of cookies, cookies are generally a rather inocuous way for a particular website to exchange an extremely limited amount of information with your web browser.  A cookie is what allows a website to know which links you have clicked on during the current or previous visits and to show these in a different color to the as yet unvisited links.  A cookie is what allows you to personalize a web search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

The media and some hype-driven pseudo tabloid journalists will tell you that cookies are transmitted clandestinely between the server and your computer and that's dead right.  Do you know happen to know what's involved in setting up a connection with the website in the first place?  Is that communication therefore bad just because you don't get to see and approve every packet?  Let me just say that if you had to view and approve every single packet involved in setting up a connection with a remote web site, you'd never get to view any content as the computer would be hurled out the window well before the web browser started to display anything.