I love Apple products, but I don't like the policies behind the App Store or iTunes.  That said, Steve Jobs got it right when he banned Adobe's Flash from Apple's mobile platform.

Flash is the technology for peristing information about you and your surfing habits outside of your browser.  In other words it a perfect end run around privacy settings.  It didn't start out that way on purpose either. 

The Flash architecture has 'LSO's (Local Shared Object) that live on your computer as files.  They hold more information than browser cookies.  They are also known as 'zoombie flash cookies' as they are not tied to a flash annimation.  When you visit a website, it looks to see if it's (and third party) cookies are there.  If not, it will look to see if its LSO is present.  If yes, it will recreate the browser cookies.

Google lets you see your settings by visitng this link: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences  BTW, Google bought DoubleClick.

Having a customized surfing experience may be beneficial in certain situations, but I can't persuade myself, 100% of the time.  And forcing me to opt-out instead of opt-in is convenient for business (and ahem, government), but not consumers (or citizens).

I am not against sharing information, but I demand to know exactly what I am sharing and be able to turn it off.  I actually think that consumers would embrace a customizable web visit if they viewed it as something they can tweak rather than a nefarious, secret attempt to extract personal information.

The implications are vast and far ranging when you consider that companies can combine web travels with credit card records and public records.  If you're thinking what's the big deal, here's the reason.  It turns out to take surprisely little information to accurately identify a person.  No more than 6 fields and it can sometimes be done with only three.  I live in democracy, as imperfect as it is, and there's a reason why voting is a private matter.  I'd like to keep it that way.

My browser is FireFox because its plug-ins offer the most control over privacy.  The two plug-ins I use are Ghostery and BetterPrivacy.