I'm a little bit more pessimistic, though, about the uprising. I'm more of a believer in the principle that it takes small fences to control large animals. These tiny little regulations that get built into the code are tiny little controls that can be quite significant in affecting behavior. They just seem innocuous, like speed bumps. We have an architecture of the web right now that makes it hard to control what data are gathered about you.
Cookies are one part of that technology.
The architecture is now that you can turn cookies on or turn cookies off. If you turn cookies off, or if you turn them back on when you get to a certain site, then 90 percent of your online life is spent making a decision about this. So most people just turn cookies on and live with it and that's that. Now, there's another possible response, which is to imagine an architecture that's much more subtle in its ability to negotiate privacy preference. But rather than rising up to demand this other architecture, most people just sit back, turn cookies on, and surf without thinking about it much.