Originally Posted by ruff

Well, I won't argue with you about that, without cookies the affiliates definitely will be hurting. To clarify, although I do have a sponsor program, I am derive a great deal of my income from my affiliate sales of others programs. What I think is that it will be insignificant. I don't think there will be a wholesale use of the privacy feature. The people that want to use it are not there in big numbers in my opinion. Try using a browser with the privacy feature enabled for a day or so. It's so utterly inconvenient, that you would switch back as soon as possible. In the corporate environment where you would find users that could use this function, the IT dept has already pretty much made porn inaccessible.

Tracking by IP is no better, obviously that only works with static IP addresses and even those change unless the customer is paying a fee for it. I don't even believe there is static IP addresses for mobile. So when you get down to it, there actually is not a better tracking solution than the cookie. So much Internet commerce relies on it, that until everyone is assigned a permanent IP address, nothing much is going to change.

Just imagine usernames/passwords, I use a ton of them and several programs to manage them. With the privacy feature enabled, I have to remember the user/pass for every single site I go to and, believe me, that is going to get old in a hurry.