Not if you're the only user of your computer. Heh.
The secret recording of all web activity (which is done by IE and Microsoft) is a major violation of privacy, regardless of the number of users of a single computer.
I'm perfectly aware of it, so it's no secret to me. And the information is contained locally on your computer, not on their servers, so they don't have access to it.
Another smart thing to do is sign up for an account on Google (if you happen to use it as your primary search engine). It will store a history of all of your searches and will also show you which pages you visited when searching for a particular thing.
The smart thing to do is to delete the Google cookie after every Google use so that you are not tracked around the web.
You clearly are not a privacy advocate 
Privacy is certainly a valid concern, but tracking cookies are a very low threat. And all of the info contained within Google's cookies is pretty tame, and in most cases, nobody else is even going to see the information.
