It would be good if konqueror had a way to keep cookies that
you really care about separate from the usual collection of
trash cookies that one collects while surfing. That way,
you could have a separate expiration policy (trash expires
in 24 hours, *my* cookies never expire). Or, if you clear
private data, it wouldn't clear your important cookies.
Why? Because cookies can represent subscriptions and
logins. They can represent money you have paid to access
a web site. They can represent the effort you spent to
rummage under your keyboard to find the password for a site :).
You don't want to throw that kind of stuff
away, at least not without explicit manual confirmation.
On the other hand, most (99%) of cookies are either
(a) advertising/tracking cookies which have no value to
the user, or (b) represent the current state of one's progress
through a website (which rarely has value beyond a day).
The world has given us two types of cookies, so the browser
should help us handle each group appropriately.
I would suggest this:
*If a cookie is in the "important" class, it will *only* be accepted
on positive manual confirmation. So, a website would (somehow)
ask that certain cookies be given the manual treatment.
*Then, these cookies would have a separate expiration policy and
would not be affected by the default "clear private data" operation.