I work in online advertising. Google is not the first to implement BT technology. It's been around on MSN, Yahoo, AOL and a few online networks for at least a year. Maybe you didn't notice. Get over it. It's a good thing for you, and a good thing for the industry.
One of the big worries in the industry right now is cookie deletion. There is a serious misconception of what a cookie is, making people think it is intrusive, or can undermine their online security and privacy. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
NO PERSONAL INFORMATION IS COLLECTED OR STORED IN A COOKIE.
We in the industry use cookies to implement Behavioral Targeting, to serve you more relevant ads. We use them for frequency capping, so you don't keep seeing the same ads over and over again. We use them for Return on Investment tracking, so we can better spend our advertising budgets, wasting less money, and keeping consumer prices competitive.
Cookies are an essential technology to the online advertising industry, and to the author's point, help support all that free content you take for granted. Please don't delete them!

I've seen ignorant people in powerful non-IT positions scared of cookies, using them as an excuse to implement even more ignorant security measures, even using that as an excuse to stonewall more important security changes.

There are far more important things to worry about than 1 KB text files stored on a computer.

I would tend to agree with the article and the two previous posts but at the same time I think there is an important point in all this. The "don't worry, be happy" attitude can be dangerous and I am for informing and educating online users about ALL these issues. I am a little horrified at times how the tech industry often seems to think that my computer, my browser, and my browsing history belong to them. I see the argument about free-but-ad-supported content and people should be aware of that. But, most of the time, I find the behaviour targeting to still be very crude and, often, it seems marketers try to fit individuals into their own pre-existing categories. It often cannot really take into account the complexities of actual behaviour and individual interests that exist and which exist beyond the confines of consumer activity (not everything I look at online is related to consumerism or is a reflection of purchasing interest). And, really, do you expect individuals to take what any corporation says these days as honest truth? Sure, you're *not* going to collect my personal data and sell it to Axiom Corp. or give it to the Dept. of Homeland Security? Yeah right. These days I am more inclined to pay for content and stay completely away from proprietary technology. I have a brand new Ubuntu-running laptop running open source (and non-data-collecting) software... I donate to the organizations who make the software and seek out the ads/information/products that I want to see, when I want to see it. I am very happy and still spend lots of money to support the economy.

Larry, a web programmer can store whatever they want in a cookie.

There is a lot of information exchanged between the web server and user all of which a web programmer has access to. If the user has authenticated to backend systems then the programmer has access to this information and can store it in a cookie, on the user's computer. Agreed, they shouldn't but there is nothing stopping this from happening.

It wouldn't take much to read this back when the user visits some other supposedly "trusted" website.

The "Trust us, we know what we're doing" approach to security and privacy simply doesn't work.