[grumbel]

For cookies to have a cost they would need to be visible first. Brave does that right, by not only blocking lots of them out of the box, but also by showing you how many it blocked straight in the address bar, without any extra clicks. Firefox in contrast doesn't do that. It doesn't even give an easy way to inspect the cookies, it just has a "Clear cookies and site data" button that doesn't even tell you what it has stored or what it is going to delete.

Simply put, browser could to a lot better job at preventing this.

As for legitimate use, I don't really see much. Login handling is the obvious one, but I'd argue that login handling itself is in dire need of a rework and should be handled by a proper Web standard, not site specific hacks and "Save password" guesswork.

[woojoo666]

That's fair, I would love for browsers to give more transparency on the tracking front.

As for legitimate use cases, I think shopping carts on most online marketplaces use cookies.