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DoubleClick Workaround: IDcide

Posted by jamie on from the cool-company-name dept.

No cookies with offsite GIFs: that's the privacy solution implemented by IDcide (take a moment to register the pun, OK, there ya go). Here's technical background on offsite cookies; here's the CNNstory; here's the software FAQ (it's only available for Windows/MSIE). If you're not sure why offsite cookies matter, you must read this. And, not to rain on IDcide's revenue model -- their product does other stuff too -- but why isn't offsite cookie rejection built into all browsers? Anyone from Mozilla want to talk about this?

2 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Better solution - Junkbuster by Booker · · Score: 5
    I've been using Junkbuster for quite a while now. It's awesome, and it's free.

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  2. From passive resistance to Active Disruption by bifurcator · · Score: 5

    Why not go one step further? If companies like DoubleClick want to collect information on you through cookies, let them.

    One thing I imagine you could is actively contaminate the personal information that they are managing to collect on you. How would you do that? You could set up a shared cookie repository somewhere on the web. Everytime a banner network plants a cookie on your machine, you could submit it to the repository. Everytime you are about to send a cookie back to the same banner network, you would get grab someone else's cookie from the repository and send it to the unsuspecting banner ad server.

    To reiterate, if you were to send your Aunt Susie's cookie to DoubleClick everytime their banner ad displays on your page, you would contaminate Aunt Susie's personal profile in the DoubleClick database.

    If a lot of people were to cooperate in this way, they could render their personal profiles totally useless to advertisers, because the signal to noise ratio would be very low.