Telemarketing is so universally loathed that you can't even mention the subject without eliciting waves of moans and laments. Yet there's not that much we can do about it. You can laboriously tell each of your banks, telecom companies and other service providers not to resell your name and number -- but who has the time to figure out how, and who knows whether they'll actually comply? You can say to the hapless callers, "Not interested -- and take me off your list!" but you'll never be sure they've done so -- or you might get a friendly reply, as I once did, like, "I can't, because you're fat!" (I don't think that's true, but hey, even if it were, how would he know?) You can turn off your phone, but then you sort of defeat the purpose of having one in the first place.

Next to the scourge of telemarketing, the kind of aggressive marketing that thrives on the Net looks fairly tame. Now, to be sure, spam is a gargantuan nuisance. Because Salon has been online for close to six years now, and because we've always had a policy of publishing our e-mail addresses all over the site so readers could reach us, our e-mail addresses are now on every "Bulk E-Mail Works!!!!" list of addresses in existence, and every morning we wake up to dozens of unwanted messages in our in boxes. Fortunately, though, they take seconds to delete, and can be removed on our own schedule. There are other steps we can take to sidestep spam if we really need to, like changing our e-mail addresses.

Talk to large numbers of Net users about aggressive marketing, though, and you will probably hear less about spam, which already seems to be accepted as an unavoidable hazard like the weather, than about the dreaded scourge of cookies. Cookies: evil spawn of Web marketers designed to track you down, follow you about and nail you!

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If you listen to the general run of complaints against cookies -- little text files that Web sites deposit on your computer for a variety of purposes -- you might think that they are some accursed technological disease that, having once infected your hard drive, leaves you open and vulnerable to the predations of legions of unscrupulous marketers, spreaders of viruses and malicious hackers everywhere.

I've been thinking about cookies lately because here at Salon, our new Premium program relies on them in order to work properly, and we've corresponded with a small but vocal group of readers who feel strongly that All Cookies Must Be Destroyed. And though I am normally a diehard on issues of Web privacy, I have to report that cookies have been unfairly maligned.

A little history is in order: Web browser cookies came into being in the early days of Netscape, when programmer Lou Montulli integrated them in the browser to get around the Web's problem of "statelessness." Each time your Web browser calls on a page from a site, it sends out a request, gets a response and then closes the connection -- so that, from page to page, a Web site has trouble remembering any information about you.

This is fine if you want to stay anonymous, but problematic if a Web site wants to deliver any kind of individualized service to you -- and that kind of service was what the Web promised customers. So Netscape's cookies (later adopted by most other browsers) became part of the Web's basic infrastructure: The browser would allow sites to deposit the cookie on your computer as a kind of key so the sites could recognize you from page to page and from visit to visit. Without this capability, most of the Web's services wouldn't work at all, or would require you to log in with annoying frequency.

That cookies are data on your computer that is created and manipulated by remote Web sites is what makes them mysterious and threatening to many users. It seems like the hand of some impersonal company is reaching onto your own hard drive and doing stuff behind your back, and that gives people the willies.

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