2
By default cookies are enabled, so the user has to make the conscious decision to turn them off.
Depending on your location it is a mandatory requirement to tell users that your site uses cookies. I believe it helps educate the user as you would provide further information about the purpose of the cookies and how it helps improve their experience on the website. Granted cookies can be used for malicious purposes but on the whole they help the website provide a better service to the user.
If you are to use cookies, tell the user that you do and provide a ‘Cookie policy’ which states the use of the cookie. People will be more inclined to allow cookies on your site.
Having said that, if the cookie keeps personal data such as names, locations, passwords etc in plain text it would definitely not be a good idea to store this data in a cookie. You are better off passing the data to the server within a form or storing it in a user session and processing it on the server side.
