In other words, many companies are taking advantage of Internet Explorer’s poor cookie blocking implementation for their own purposes. Their excuse is that P3P is dead and IE’s cookie blocking would break their website, so they just work around the browser’s privacy controls.

My gut feeling is that we've passed beyond the era where it made sense to concentrate on Internet privacy controls and issues mainly in terms of specific technologies as we've done in the past.

As noted above, cookies are neither good nor bad, neither intrinsically righteous nor evil. Cookies, like the other local storage mechanisms that have now been implemented, are merely tools. And as with other tools, how they are used is under the control of the entities who deploy these complex functionalities…What we really need to be concentrating on are the fundamental issues of trust and transparency.

If we as users feel confident that individual firms are doing their best to be transparent about their policies and are handling our data in responsible manners, then putting our trust (and data) in the hands of those firms is a solid bet.

The only other firms I can think of with this kind of sustained inability to make their internal controls stick are on Wall Street. Google has already had to pay out a <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/25/business/la-fi-google-settlement-20110825">$500 million fine</a> for running advertisements for illegal pharmaceutical imports. And the company is already operating under a stringent consent decree with the FTC from the Buzz debacle. If those weren't sufficient to convince Larry Page to put his house in order, it's hard to know what will be. Sooner or later, the company will unleash on the internet a piece of software written by the programmer equivalent of a Jérôme Kerviel or a Kweku Adoboli and it won't be pretty, for the public or for Google.