[gearhart]

You're right, the study's not worthless - the "key findings" are all accurate and portray a reasonably sensible, true-to-life picture of the results, and we do need more easily-consumable, experimentally-justified content to help ensure that the public doesn't end up backing stupid laws.

That said, the article's focus on 31st December 9999 and outliving the lifespan of the user, the discussion around the number of cookies served (rather than the number of parties serving cookies, and the amount and type of data that they're storing, which is what we're really concerned about here), and the click-baity headline to both the page and the HN article take what was probably a very sensible study and pervert the reader into drawing conclusions for all the wrong reasons. Giving public funding to something that's going to place that sort of bias (which in a private news publication would be fine) between the public and science I find pretty galling.