A site could grab any part of the file only after you had approved how the data would be used. The World Wide Web Consortium, which develops various standards for the Web, is mulling the proposal and working on its own privacy standard. It should be completed within a year. Of course, you can avoid keying in anything you consider private. But that would bar you from using quite a few sites, and abstinence is not always foolproof.
Web users do have a few ways to deal with the cookie problem.
Surfing through the Anonymizer hides your identity but slows you down to some degree. You can also program most popular Web browsers to accept or reject cookies before they are downloaded to your hard disk. You are everywhere. None of these tools, however, will wipe out details about you that are stored in online databases ranging from telephone books like Switchboard and WorldPages to commercial reference services such as Lexis-Nexis, CDB Infotek and Information America. Resourceful thieves can exploit these online caches.