OK, Shibumi, I appreciate the change in tone. Also, you and Salamander got my attention here. I had no idea.
I understand the implications of internet privacy. I can assure you that whatever those cookies are doing, I'm not getting any sort of report from my web hosting provider about them... and I'm quite sure if they were using that info to track viewers, they'd be offering the information to us at a fee so we could use it to provide targeted ads (which we don't do, by the way).
My guess without knowing is that these cookies are purely mechanical in nature to make the graphics on the site work since we have not enabled any of the features such as requesting people to input their zip code which would allow any sort of identification of readers or their location. There is an option to register, but because the commenting engine is on a separate website, www.pulaskicountyweb.com, there is no need to register and most readers do not do so.
As websites have become more and more graphics-intensive, it's become necessary to put more and more “stuff” on them to make them work. I'm not happy about that. In addition to privacy concerns, this is rural America, lots of people still use dialup, and anything that slows down a site for dialup customers is a problem.
We also don't do targeted ads, as many newspaper websites will, based on items in the browser history. I check my cookies periodically and since I spend a lot of time on newspaper and television station websites, there's always a long, long list. Targeted internet advertising is something we simply have not chosen to do, and I don't think our software is even able to do it without buying an upgraded web hosting plan. Personally I see no economic benefit in that level of tracking, and even if I saw an economic benefit I do not think I would want to do it.