The cookie placed on your computer does not subject you to any additional advertising, it simply focuses the ads being offered to you.  As long as you will be confronted with advertising on web sites, it's really to your advantage to allow the ads to be targeted to your interests. 

AdSense may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit this website.  These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.  Again, this does not increase the amount of advertisements you see, it only targets the ads more closely to your interests.  If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please see Google's Privacy Policy with regard to advertising. 

The bottom line is that I would not be subscribing to Google's AdSense service if I believed it was in any way harmful to either of us.  And just FYI, I'm not making a bundle here.  The revenue just about covers the cost of keeping this site online, which was the intended goal.