Broken By Design. WordPress, missing admin icons and tracking cookies

I recently installed a fresh copy of WordPress, which installed fine. However, when I went into the admin panel, none of the icons were displaying, just a stylised ‘x’ for missing image.

Looking around various forums, including those here, provided no answers. Except someone started going on about it being a browser issue.

So I tried it in another browser, one I very rarely use, only for testing layouts etc, and there were the icons, not missing at all.

I went back to my original browser (Opera, but that’s not relevant if you read on), and the icons were still missing.

Curious.

A bit more reading in threads that were insisting “browser issues” lead me to a comment about enabling 3rd party cookies.

Now why would I want to do that? I have my main browser on every machine I use (about 5) set up to block ads, stop popups, only accept cookies from the site I’m on. The usual stuff. Safe browsing habits.

So as a test, I cleared the cache and deleted every single cookie, which naturally logged me out, enabled third-party cookies, and logged back in.

And there were the icons in the admin panel.

With a sense of mild indignation, I checked the cookies in the browser. Yes, there’s my WP admin cookie, and look at that underneath it – a Yahoo tracking cookie.

Why (oh why oh why?) does a Yahoo tracking cookie need to be set before the admin icons will display? What purpose does this serve me? I have nothing to do with Yahoo, and I certainly didn’t give them permissions to place a tracking cookie in my browser when I’m only accessing my own website?

Why isn’t this disclosed in the WordPress docs?
Why does it possibly make me break EU law by not declaring it being set because I know nothing about it?
Why is the WP product broken without allowing Yahoo to track my browser?