Do You Yahoo? Good Laws, Bad Uses5/2/2000; 6:39:26 PM "The suit alleges that the companies' use of cookies, or little text files written into a personal computer's hard drive to identify a computer user, violates Texas' anti-stalking law."No no no! This is a thoroughly bad bad bad idea. It may seem like a smart use of the law, but it's smart as in "smart-aleck", not "smart Nobel Prize winner". Cookies are not stalking. If cookies are to be compared to anything in the real world, it would be radio tagging an animal, except that cookies only work some of the time, and the tags can be removed or rejected (see, even that's not such a good metaphor). You dare not start down the path of creating metaphors for all Internet activity and then start legislating based on that; it will not work. It creates a miasma of legislation and will not 'scale', in engineering parlance; you are constantly creating new special cases for the Internet program du jour.I've written elsewhere that metaphors are not arguments, and a more general expression of that idea is "Metaphors are useful only for explaining, never deciding." (Perhaps On Deciding... Better should do a bit on what I call the 'metaphor' fallacy. I'm tempted to do so myself, it just wouldn't be as good. Too many people thinking about Internet issues resort to metaphors, which unfortunately is a form of intellectual laziness in this environment where so much is new.) Cookies and the privacy invasions they've been used for (note: 'been used for', not 'caused') should be treated as all-new types of crimes that may, upon further inspection, happen to bear some relationships to old-style crimes.