Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster is famous for his hunger (“Me want cookie!”), blue fur and googly eyes. Google, on the other hand, is gaining a less pleasant reputation for how its cookies – the small digital files that online advertisers use to track which sites a user visits – invade privacy. There has been too little progress in resolving the issue, which shows the need for more effective public policy.

Google uses cookies to record a user’s internet searches and, in March, closed a deal to buy advertising company DoubleClick, which uses cookies to collect information about which sites surfers visit. Yet last week Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said that Google had yet to start substantial deliberations on how it would address privacy concerns given the mass of detailed information that the combined company would hold.