It appears that the USA Today may have been correct in their 15 year-old estimation that the Internet, as far as privacy is concerned, is an “Electronic Pandora’s Box.” It’s unclear whether Congress will move on privacy legislation and while the Federal Trade Commission is expected to release a report in support of a Do-Not-Track list, for now it appears that the user is on his own. The best solution to confronting privacy online may be taking it into your own hands. http://bit.ly/b32VvQ

will prevent most of this. NoScript can be set to put buttons on the file menu bar to allow or clear cookies, clear cache, allow images, and change the User Agent (, or more).

Web browsing doesn't *require* an "exchange of information", that's just scummy commercial interests looking to make a buck by retailing Chinese gadgets, and offensive in general. All that information can also be used to deduce who's likely to lead the resistance, John Conner, for when they get the robots.

"Local Shared Object" on wikipedia.

Then action accordingly - manually or with a batch file or a cleaner of choice that deals with this stuff.

BetterPrivacy (to get rid of LSOs - a.k.a. Flash cookies).