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New Technique for Tracking Web Site Visitors
bigtallmofo writes "According to Jupiter Research, 58% of web surfers deleted cookies from their system in 2004. This has sent a loud message to marketers in regard to consumer's preference as to tracking their online activities. The marketers have responded with PIE. Persistent Identification Element (PIE) is a technology that uses Macromedia's Flash MX to track you even without using cookies. Macromedia has created a page to instruct users on how to disable this."
not to install flash. What good features did it have anyway?
If it's being used for this then I guess I can finally take the plunge and get it off my machine completely. I guess I'll be missing all that "cool" stuff on "teh interweb" but I'm sure I'll survive.
I bet Macromedia is thinking the same thing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That Firefox flashblock is one of the best technologies ever. The idea is so simple, and should have been an option in the actual flash itself: the thing doesn't load unless you click on it and say so. Most things should be like that, or be able to be set like that, and it's annoying when a company wants to control your property in such a fashion.
I mean, I have flash to play the occasional game or watch a movie. That shouldn't make me susceptible to ads crapping all over my eyeballs.
More importantly, Macromedia should be on my side with this, unless they are somehow benefitting everytime a flash app is loaded (which isn't impossible, but creates a serious conflict of interest).
I would wager that 58% of users know someone who is a "computer person" who, in their routine of cleaning all their friends' and family's boxes from spyware/adware, also deleted tracking cookies.
Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.
gee, thanks mookie, i just wouldn't know what to believe on the internet if it weren't for all your protection. oh, and thanks for preventing me from deleting my own files. you're right, i really did want those after all. you're such a good friend.
*happy sigh*
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
to your point, however, some % of that 58% are likely deleting cookies when e.g. AdAware or Yahoo! antispy is telling them to clean up this "tracking info."
Regardless, it's a Good Thing users are doing this.
It's almost, but not quite, time for spyware removal programs to remove Flash as hostile code. It's probably time for programs like AdAware to offer the user the option of easily removing Flash. Perhaps with a message like this:
"Macromedia Flash is a program used primarily to deliver advertising messages. It can turn on your microphone and camera (if present) and transmit the results to advertisers, store personalized data on your machine and transmit it to advertisers, and play commercials with audio. Do you want to remove Macromedia Flash?"
58% know a computer person? That's a lot of computer people who don't know how to install SP2.
It's not an uphill battle to track visitors. You can track a visitor just fine. You can even track them from business transaction to business transaction just fine.
What advertisers are having a hard time doing is tracking visitors across sites or across casual visits to the same site, and I'm THRILLED by that. Hey, I know it makes their business harder and less cost effective, but that's not really my problem. Let the Web business model collapse a bit more. I think it's healthy.
Oh, and using Flash won't help. Most people are getting wise to Flash and are installing features like the Firefox plugin that requires you to click on an icon in order to activate a flash component (should you want to). I consider Flash dangerous, and I don't execute dangerous code unless I REALLY trust the place I'm getting it.
Check out this nugget from the article
United Virtualities's PIE helps combat this consumer behavior by leveraging a feature in Flash MX called local shared objects.
"combat this customer behavior"? Is this how companies are viewing the general public?
Anyone who mods me down for expressing this perfectly valid opinion needs to get out more.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
What advertisers are having a hard time doing is tracking visitors across sites or across casual visits to the same site, and I'm THRILLED by that.
Well, that's one positive effect, but what you're missing is that individual sites cannot track their repeat visitors. This is one of the most important numbers you can track - it makes it pretty hard to cater to your audience as a content provider if you don't know how many of the 50,000 people you get to your site in a day have even seen it before.
Remember, it's not just advertisers that track visitors. It's mostly the sites themselves, and site providers use those numbers to try to provide better content for their readers (which will in turn hopefully lead to greater numbers of readers). If, for example, you know that 50% of your audience is repeat visits, and that a majority of those repeat visitors actually come to your site more than once per day (a-la Slashdot), then you will probably want to rotate content in and out more quickly. On the other hand, if you're seeing hardly any repeat visitors at all, then you will know that some substantive changes probably need to be made to the site to encourage repeat business.
Deleting cookies throws this all out of whack and makes it difficult for web sites to know what their readers really want. Of course, there are other ways for sites to track visitors, but it's difficult to do across multiple sessions (repeat visits) without cookies.
Most people are getting wise to Flash and are installing features like the Firefox plugin that requires you to click on an icon in order to activate a flash component (should you want to).
Most people use Internet Explorer and a lot of them do not even know that Firefox (let alone the plugin) exists. I highly doubt they are getting wise to Flash.
Let's not forget, to a lot of people IE is the Internet and/or Google/Yahoo is a web browser.
I think it's time for SVG to replace flash for our vector animation needs. It can be lightweight (in it's gzipped form), and doesn't have delusions of grander about being an application development environment (which flash does rather poorly). It's nice to see that SVG is making head-ways in Linux (especially KDE) and the mobile market, but we need to get the word out to the general populace (or, at least, web developers).
End of Line
the whole delete your cookies thing is silly. i run several web sites that use cookies to track logins, not for me to track them but for the site to track who is logged in.
Translation: I'm doing the right thing, so obviously the other 99.9999% of the world is as well and we are all "fools" for believing otherwise.
Please, most websites try to hit me with a doubleclick.net cookie or an advertising.com cookie right away. I'm no "fool" for deleting that sort of thing. Nor am I a fool for deleting all of the miscellaneous cookies I get, e.g. from misconfigured sites which leave Apache's mod_unique_id enabled for no reason.
As for user-tracking cookies, which may well be useful, there are two kinds: session cookies (which my browser does and should delete at the end of the session) and unreliable ones (e.g. ones which treat everyone on a public terminal or a family computer system as the same person). Ditching isn't such a bad idea (though I personally leave a few around from sites which I do use and trust).
Remember, the web is not a publication medium. It is designed to be interpreted by the user's web browser. If the user turns off images, they will see no images. If they turn off flash, there's no flash. If they use a screen-reader... well, you get the idea. That's the way the web was always intended to work. Turning off/deleting cookies is no different. The user controls the experience, plain and simple, and apparently 58% of people have decided to do that. Good for them, especially given the number of junk cookies out there.
If you really want to track repeat users/readers for purposes other than advertising, look setting up a login. If they really like the site they'll sign up...kinda like the over 700k+ that have signed up on slashdot. :)
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
You seem to be mistaken the quote very clearly states consumer behaviour not customer behaviour. Most companies have long ago stopped seeing you as anything other then an income source.
Think about Flash applications. One Flash movie load of 200K can replace a dozen or more page views at 100K each. So 200K vs. 1200K. Which is less?
It's probably a tie, or pretty close to it.
On those dozen HTML pages, many elements such as graphics, stylesheets, and client-side scripting are going to be common across all of the pages. After they've been fetched once, they're going to be in the client's browser cache and won't have to be sent across the wire again.
Thus, the first page access will result in 100K going across the network. The second page may only be 30K of new traffic. Depending on how many pages the user needs to visit, HTML could be more or less pageweight.
Given the declining popularity of slow dialup connections, and all the other benefits of using HTML, I would say that if a site could be done equally well in either Flash or HTML except for pageweight, it should absolutely be done in HTML. Which isn't to say that there aren't instances where Flash is the better (or only) solution...
Flash would actually be more powerful than cookies, because it would share the same information between browsers. Browsers (IE, Firefox) typically have their own unique set of cookie data. Flash uses a single set of data for all browsers on a machine. So if you visit the Gadgetron (semi-fictional company) website using Firefox in the morning, and then return to the same site with IE, Flash will recognise you as the same customer. This works on Windows at least.
But don't tell marking folks that.
You mentioned frequency capping. What frequency capping? After seeing the stupid animated ad for mortgages (you know the one--it has little buttons for every state, in various configurations) or the stupid "click the moving object" ads for the thousanth time, I have no reason to trust advertisers to 'cap' the number of times I see an ad for any given product. I wouldn't mind seeing a few ads for a new product I'm not familiar with, but I'm sick of seeing ads for mortgate refinancing ten or twenty times a day every !*&(*& day. Advertisers seem to just want every consumer to see their ad as many times as possible, without limit. They have proven by their behavior that this is their goal. Why would we trust them when they claim that they need cookies to provide "frequency capping"? There must be some other motive behind it.
If advertisers don't shape up, we are all going to be using Adblock before long. I'm aware that advertising often pays for content, and I'm willing to see ads to have good content, but there are limits. If you make your ads annoying, intrusive, or privacy-violating they will be blocked. Maybe the amount of content on the web will decline, or maybe the existing ad companies will go bankrupt and will be replaced by ones that are more aware of what consumers want. The current trend cannot continue, however.
So this is what it's come to: we the consumers are officially enemy combatants?!?
OK then, fine. I can live with that.
But tell me one thing: can a businesses that hires a marketeer that treats their customers thus way live without my business, or say, the business of the 58% of Internet users that are apparently getting tired enough of this crap to actively seek out and delete cookies?
Didn't think so.
Business needs to realize that it is precisely because of this entitlement mentality that people are beginning to get pissed. Personal lives and habits are not a gift given automatically with the purchase of a six-pack. My $3.49 doesn't give you any right to compile a psychological shoppping profile. You want to know about my buying habits? Ask Me!!! Try to take it without my knowledge, or sneak it off my hard drive and I'll treat your business no better than I would a common thief: from an extreme distance, and fully armed.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Ah, but their advertising is still getting to you. Brand recognition. When was the last time you choose a brand you'd heard of over one you'd never heard of? That's advertising. Otherwise, you'd have heard of neither.
Oh, which Cola do you drink? ;-)