Cookie Use is out of Control

by Bob Bloom
Just read an interesting report.  “In just visiting the homepage of {the top 100 most} popular sites, we found 32 websites placed 100 or more cookies, 7 websites placed 200 or more cookies, and 6 websites placed 300 or more cookies.”
http://techscience.org/a/2015121502/

A visit to the top 100 homepages (and no other pages) would give you a total of 6,280 cookies – 83% of them from 3rd party hosts.  If one added just two links at random on each of those 100 home pages, you’d get 12,857 cookies deposited on your computer.  Here’s a list of the top 100 sites:
https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites
 
Here’s a chart of the ‘deep crawl’, i.e. the home page + 2 random (but still on the same domain) links:

This is double what the same study found just 2 years ago.  (I want to know what those top 8 cookie spewer sites are, but the paper does not say.)  And that’s why I block ads.