[amalcon]

It's not that difficult. Turn off your cookies. Manually allow them for the rare cases where they're actually necessary. If that's too much work for you, clear cookies or turn on your browser's "privacy" mode before you buy anything.

This sort of thing has gone on for years. You used to be able to find a good deal on a flight at orbitz.com, leave to go comparison shopping, come back, and see a higher price. Clear the cookies, the original price was back.

[bigiain]

I wonder if a Firefox plugin could have a list of shopping aggregator sites (like Bing and google shopping) and automatically block referrers when using outgoing links from them, and maybe specially treat cookies being set by the sites those links land on?

[Sidnicious]

In a way, this is why the EU's recent discussion on requiring permission to set cookies actually makes sense.

Aside from login, the vast majority of cookies on the web don't significantly benefit the user. The only reason I don't use a browser that ignores or prompts for cookies is that so many websites use them inappropriately these days, and the web would be unbrowsable without them.