[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.