There Will Be Complaints

I was going to add a note about how cookies once seemed the Big Danger (there were programs to "defeat" cookies), and now we treat them as possibly a nuisance (assuming you like to keep your hard drive free of unnecessary files), and more likely, we've even come to accept them as a "necessary" part of surfing the internet. (Cookies perform the "useful" task of remembering us and our preferences on given websites.... big help if you want to fill out lead-gathering forms again and again... though in truth, at a site like Amazon, they can be very useful, and after all, you go to a site like Amazon expecting to give up personal information when you shop, and enjoying the benefits of being remembered when you return.) But then I was reading the latest issue of PC Magazine and one of the editors, John Dvorak, was ranting about all the invasions of privacy thought up by programmers - and he included cookies.
And it got me thinking: have we just gotten complacent, and used to being "cookied," and will we eventually become complacent and get used to being spyed on (it's already happening, as near as I can tell, as more and more site are going for a 2-tier structure: you pay and we won't spy on you, don't pay, and we're free to spy all we want...) and then, who knows what's next?
Even as I write this I kind of have to chuckle at the idea of people posting what amounts to diaries to the internet where anyone can read them. When I wa a kid, diaries came with locks...