[troels]

It seems a bit disingenuous to present numbers like that. For the lay person, it may sound scary that there as 44 cookies on a given page, but that's a completely arbitrary measure. I would think that the important thing isn't the number of cookies, but rather what which entities they are shared with and to some extend the information attached to them. First party cookie for example are not a privacy issue at all.

[Drakim]

In my opinion it is actually pretty scary.

As I see it, a website should upon landing either set zero or one cookie, depending on if the website has some sort of persistent functionality (like a message to first time visitors).

The other 43 cookies are, in my view, therefore unnecessary to the normal functioning of the website, and is therefore more likely being used for other purposes such as tracking and advertising.

[mrweasel]

Sadly I think that a lot of businesses either don't care or don't think about the cookies and tracking added to their site.

In my experience it's usually the marketing department that want much, not all, of the things that end up setting cookies. It's not that it's a bad idea necessarily, but it's adding tracking upon tracking upon tracking and rarely a request to remove something. Some sales person try to sell marketing "Yet another up-sell tool" or "customer retention solution" and no one considers that the site already have five of those tools installed, 3 of which isn't actually used anymore and the last two we aren't really sure of.

I think it's a scam mostly, trying to convince businesses that they're leaving profit on the floor. The providers of these tools leave real businesses jumping from one tracking/data-mining/customer-spying to another in the hope that it will boost their sales by a few percent. Do we really need to know know that much about our customer? Probably not.

[theandrewbailey]

My company had a client that would add "Yet another up-sell/retention tool" every week or so. (I know, because I added them every time.) I swear they had every single one in existence. Didn't stop them from filing bankruptcy.

[andrewingram]

I agree that a lot of functionality can be encapsulated in a session cookie. But for some cases it might not be worth the server overhead, ie language or currency selection for unregistered users.

[Drakim]

I agree that if you start using the website, setting more cookies to remember choices and such is perfectly fine. I was referring to when you first land on the website, that first page load.

[andrewingram]

Ah yeah, my bad. I agree.

[matthewmacleod]

The full details are right there in the the report, but I don't think that's a misleading headline number to use.