GlobalGCC web page seems to require cookies

don't have time for thousands of random web pages to learn whether I can trust the web pages' owners

Me either. Fortunately receiving cookies has bugger all to do with trusting the web page owner.

Larry

I'll never understand this mindset. I was fairly sure it was just the 45+ year old computer-illerate yester-year nerds who read an article in PC Magazine in the late 90's about cookies and tracking services who actually got freaked out by them these days.

Let's say somebody *gasp* tracks you with a cookie. What is that going to do, precisely? Are they going to use the information to peek a camera through your bedroom window? Start calling your mother telling her what pages you've been visiting? Have the government bash down your door because you visited a foreign website?

Let's get into the technical nonsense here, too. If a site sets a cookie, the only people that can read it is that site itself. So the only information the site is going to get about you is whether you ever came to the site before. Which can be used to... offer you related ads to articles you've viewed before. *gasp* Instead of being flooded by a bunch of irrelevant ads, now you'll be flooded by ads that might actually interest you. Even if you still ignore all the ads, what do you really have to complain about?

If you are worried about broader tracking, those services all operate by having various sites include images from their servers. You can use an extension like AdBlocker that will just cut out all those site's images (and hence, their cookies and all tracking capabilities) or disable loading of images from sites other than the originating site.

If big media or government really wanted to track you, cookies really don't do them much good anyhow. Not when they can just bribe or subpoena your ISP to hand your 'net usage information over.

Lastly, if you want to manage cookies, there are smarter ways to do it than just blindly refusing them. Change your browser settings to always clear them on shutdown. Or only clear the ones from non-whitelisted sites. Set the max lifetime for non-whitelisted sites to a smaller value. There are tons of things you can do, many of which can even be automated so you don't even have to click any Accept/Deny buttons anymore (especially if using an extensible browser like Firefox or a derivative) that will be just as effective as outright denying the cookies and won't keep locking you out of informational and/or useful sites.

You have to be either ignorant or abnormally paranoid to get pedantic over website cookies.