Slashdot Mirror
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."
Does firefox have a plugin that reminds me to either put clothes on or turn off my camera before loading a flash plugin?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
"MMMMMMMmmmmmm.... PIE..."
I still won't load plugins into my browser, even if they offer the feature of being able to track me better.
not to install flash. What good features did it have anyway?
I have the Register to thank for this as their story pages are unreadable with Flash enabled due to haveing THREE flaming animations running at a time.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
Request: Can someone make a plugin for moxilla/firefox that blocks this? This would be somewhat akin to the flashblocker plugin that already exists (and is highly recommended).
first cookies then pies
sheesh what's next.. cake?
-SJ53
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).
Over half of all web users' cookies? That would be enough cookies to feed the populations of Africa and India for, like, decades.
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.
I'm putting my system on a low carb diet.
I dont mind if people see where I have been on the net cause like most /.'ers I only go two places /. and porn sites
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
Why isn't using an antispyware program to delete cookies considered "actively deleting cookies"? Just because you use software that accomplishes the same thing doesn't mean the cookies aren't getting deleted. That percent is probably accurate.
As far as reinstalling operating systems. Do you really think people really reinstall that often?
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.
To aid your visitor tracking, here is today's log of my Slashdot visits:
Log on,
Letter
Although I was initially shocked by reading this, I'm not too concerned because I already use FlashBlock Firefox extension.
From the site: "Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla and Firefox browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves a placeholder on the page that allows you to click to view the Flash content."
In most cases I've found this very handy, as ads on websites have recently been switching to a flash format (Yes, I could also be running the adblock extension).
For the few sites that I need it for (MBNA's Shop Safe Applet) I just click where the flash wanted to load, and it allows it.
I highly recommend this extension.
I now understand what those little flash icons trying to load in the corner of the browser were.
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
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.
... I'm on dialup.
99% of the time I bail before Flash has time to load .
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
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.
In that context, the "39% of users" and "once a month" actually sounds very conservative. I wonder where they got their figures?
The irony is that deleting cookies after the fact is not a very good privacy measure -- the people who planted them have already had a good chance to track your usage. It's much more effective to set your browser not to provide cookie information except to the originating site.
In other words, the whole cookie issue is just plain bogus.
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?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously.
No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke"... there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags! "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web! "Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar..." How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you?"
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
1) Create a "How do do your own breast examination" website using Macromedia Flash
2) Create paid-subscription-only amateur pics website
3) The best thing is you don't need a "???" step to profit. And the incoming part is tax-free, because the organization you create to teach teen girls to do their breast self-examination is not for profit...
I'm not sure about blocking it, but at least on Windows, the Flash local shared objects are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player and have a file extension of .sol. It is rather easy to delete them. Remote shared objects are a different story, but I don't see how these are really different than server side scripting tricks using sessions (eg, use a php script to serve up an image, and start a session).
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Let's see you got 1 and 1/2 out of your 4 points correct.
y /features/flash/
i ng+Flash&btnG=Google+Search
1) Bandwidth hungry.
Not always true. 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?
2) Annoying advertising.
Yep!
3) Section 508 compliance.
You're not even close to right here. Flash does support section 508 compliance. It's just like any web technology, you have to take the time to do it. http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibilit
4) Google does index Flash
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Google+index
Conclusion. You don't know what you're talking about. I hope you get modded down now that these facts have been linked for you.
What do you expect from the company that "invented" those multimedia, pop-up elements that take over the entire browser window (aka "Shoshkeles)?
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
For the last year or so, I've run with Flash disabled. I use Avant Browser, which is a shell around IE, and which fixes a LOT of the problems with IE. It provides a very fast way to toggle Flash on and off. Ordinarily, I ALWAYS have Flash disabled, and I only enable it if there is a specific site that I look at. Browsing the web without all those stupid animated ads is SOOOO much better. (I also have animated GIFs/JPEGs turned off, too. No more god damned click-the-monkey ads!)
I like Firefox, but this is one thing I miss. Does anyone know of a plug-in for Firefox that lets you easily toggle Flash on/off?
If you have to use IE for some reason, try Avant [http://www.avantbrowser.com]. It's a BIG improvement over the vanilla IE, and it uses the same rendering engine. So Avant works with sites that only work with IE. Not that I want to encourage that sort of thing (IE lock-in), but sometimes you don't have any other choice.
I wish I all advertising was "targetted" so I could promptly register myself as a 113 year old hermaphrodite with no money. Ethnic group? Hittite. Hobbies? Collecting dried cicadas. If you can ever find a dried cicada commercial site, feel free to place an ad link to it on any page I visit. Convicted felon, too, with no voting rights (to avoid political spam as well). Then I could sit back and watch all the spam and popups roll in: all 0 of them.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Anyone who mods me down for expressing this perfectly valid opinion needs to get out more.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
You doubt 58% are actively deleting cookies, but you think the same 58% are doing OS reinstalls? Dude...
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.
I consider Flash dangerous, and I don't execute dangerous code unless I REALLY trust the place I'm getting it.
wait wait wait...so you would execute dangerous code if trust the source?
Since flash based sites are annoying for a variety of reasons (read about them in other posts) I've taken to using the mobile versions of websites. For instance Hollywood.com is a useful site for finding movie showtimes but it's heavily flash/shockwave based and very annoying to view. So I use their version for mobile devices which has the information I actually care about (movie locations and showtimes) without all the extra fluff. There's nothing preventing you from viewing these on a regular browser and they are MUCH faster. True, they don't have all the features of the regular sites but if you just need the basics they are great. These sites also will help those of people who constantly whine about how bloated everything is. (you know who you are...)
Some others include:
Amazon.com
American Airlines
Slashdot
This has sent a loud message to marketers in regard to consumer's preference as to tracking their online activities.
Bad assumption. This could just mean that people value their privacy. Most people don't even know what cookies are, but they do know that when they clear history, cookies, and everything else, then the next person who uses their computer to hit MSN or Yahoo or a variety of other sites won't accidentally be logged in using their cached credentials.
Also, you're forgetting about all the false positives that many corporate firewalls will generate.
This survey is hopelessly flawed. If you want to collect real data, you have to track how many times users actually go into their browser settings and manually clear the cookies, and you have to also ask them why they are doing it.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
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."
Never really understood why users dont like tracking cookies.
.. only the user ends up paying for our less accurate user tracking. I've been working in this industry for a long time, and I *hate* advertising. I honestly believe that cookie tracking does the user an immense favour by allowing us to keep the signal to noise ratio between user and ad traffic higher.
/. more for every impression or click. More optimized delivery = more money for publisher = less ads for you.
A few things happen if you dont have cookies, the most important being that we can still do pretty much everything we can do with a cookie, only with less accuracy (since the fallback is to track ads seen/clicked via your IP address):
- we can't implement frequency capping very well. this means you have a much higher chance of seeing the same damn ad, again and again and again. you like?
- we can't tie cookie data to private user data. I'm sure some people try to (although everyone involved, including the user, would have to jump through some pretty annoying hoopes, which is why advertisers dont even bother trying. Beyond the fact that such an act is against virtually every privacy policy in existance, the chances of this happening is slim to none. I don't buy the tin foil hat fears here.
- we can't send you to the right clickthru! I know we dont click on banners very often, but when you do, wouldn't you rather go to the correct clickthru rather than an the clickthru beloning to somebody else's impression who is behind the same firewall as you?
I hate advertising and spyware as much as the next guy, but ad network tracking cookies are harmless. Honestly, why are people scared of them? The more accurately we can report ROI to advertisers, the less annoying advertising becomes since advertisers are able to optmize their campaigns to ensure that they're not wasting impressions on folks who are less likely to care about them.
Is this simply a 'if they cant track me, maybe internet advertising will do away' thing? Because we can still track you, by IP
One thing for sure is that internet advertising isn't going away, and sites that you like (this one included) stand a much better chance of staying subscription-free if the advertiser pays
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
That's fine but nobody is saying which tab in here to clickn /flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/e
and what to turn off
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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...
Thanks. You're a real pal. Now I know why every single page I visit contains either a flash ad with William Shatner waving Doritos, or from a company with a service that stops basement floods.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Actually we just like screwing up the advertisers and making them waste their money. This isn't about us users desiring to be advertised to in an efficient and effective way. It's war against marketers. We hate you.
That's why I use adblock.
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
nope what you say does not affect anyone in the corperation I work for.
all WEB internet traffic is filtered through privoxy.. therefore you can try to show any of us here the same ad over and over all you want. they do not get through and they do not get displayed.
we cut internet bandwidth use by almost 45% by adding a privoxy proxy in front of the corperate proxy.
if we block all your cookies and ad's it's extremely effective.
BTW, you cant track any of us in this company by IP. because it looks like there is one IP address that is surfing a whole crapload of places.
another nice side effect of ad filtering proxies.
I just wish that ISP's would offer a free privoxy proxy for it's users... an opt in for the customer to opt out of all the annoying web content and tracking.
So I can account for several thousand websurfers out there that you can not track and your ad's never get seen by. and I'm betting there are many many more than just the ones that work here.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well I've already bypassed this new fanlged "PIE" crap by not installing Macromedias bloody Flash in the first place.
;)
Seriously what good at all is Flash ? All it's used for is yet more marketroid spam. Having a flash enabled browser is like inviting an obnoxious teenager to come in your house and yell at you.
So what do I miss not having it ? About 3 mildly entertaining "cartoon" like things (I've seen these on a co workers box and whilst they're quite amusing I don't see my life as being any poorer by not seeing them more often) It utterly amazes me that people will willingly run this crap.
Sorry but I'm old fashioned. The only thing I want from a website is some well crafted HTML/CSS, with some supporting plain "non animated" images, and at the most, some simple client side javascript for stuff like menus (and don't worry I'll be looking at your script first. If I can't see it, it ain't running) You can do what you want on your server but not in my broser.
History has told me that allowing anything else is a disaster waiting to happen (Active-X anyone ?)
But ultimately my message to advertisers etc. is simple. You're not using my resources to advertise at me, to track me, in fact to do anything. You're not welcome to phone me, send me junk mail, knock on my door or stop me in the street. Bother me with your crap and you'll get a simple reply "Fuck off and die".
There that told 'em
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Well, I'm the next guy, and it's pretty clear to me that you don't. Deleting cookies and avoiding ads has become kind of a sport for me. I clear 'em out as soon as I'm done with a site or very shortly thereafter; it takes about 2 seconds. You've got my (dynamic) IP address, and that's all you're going to get.
Perhaps the biggest source of apprehension about cookies, and probably the reason many anti-spyware tools and services filter them, comes from the practices of companies like doubleclick.
These companies can effectively spy on your use of the web (if not other internet services with web components), watching you travel from site to site and learning your browsing, and even purchasing habits (yes, doubleclick does offer this level of integration with ecommerce sites, much as coremetrics etc does, as a 3rd party analytics provider), since their advertisements are, as they like to claim, "everywhere."
The big conspiracy theory was that they would begin to correlate individual random unique ID's from within this massive database with actual people, by cooperating with major sites that both use doubleclick and register users. They could even mix in more traditional marketing databases, and that could give you can get a pretty nice, deep stare right through anyone's clothing, so to speak. I use that metaphor deliberately, because this kind of power is the equivalent of a sex fantasy to people in the business.
And of course what's the point of doing all this if you can't sell that data all over the countryside?
Yeah yeah, we were all paranoid nuts, pass the tinfoil, ha ha ha. Then they actually started doing it. They bought a major "traditional" consumer database firm and announced their plans to do exactly this. There was an uproar. All covered on slashdot, if I recall correctly.
For the layman: Cookies are designed with an important limitation: the cookie "namespace" is tightly bound to the domain from which the cookie was set. This is necessary for a variety of reasons. You don't want site A reading site B's data, for instance.
But a company like doubleclick has their servers hit directly from web pages all over the net. They can set a globally unique identifier cookie on their domain, and use it to track you as you hit pages on every other domain that includes a double click image. And of course they know where you hit their image from various data in the request; the "referer," querystring tagging, etc.
So, uh, you can "trust" doubleclick to do the right thing and not reveal what they know about your travels through the big messy public library we call the internet. But I suggest you "Trust No One," even when the giant faceless marketing company doesn't have unprecedented means, enormous motive, and unique opportunity.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
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.
Oh my. Where to begin.
.. go for it. I only meant to point out that relying on the deletion of cookies to thrawt advertisers is not a terribly effective tactic. Proxying out requests to ad servers and networks works wonderfully; but if we dont serve an ad to you, why the hell would we want to track you? To us, you wouldn't exist, which is fine by us and you.
> all WEB internet traffic is filtered through privoxy.. therefore you can try to show any of us here the same ad over and over all you want. they do not get through and they do not get displayed.
Where, in my parent post, did I say anything about blocking the actual ad requests? I have no problem with this, and if you do it, more power to you. I was talking STRICLY about cleaning cookies as a means of fighting advertisers.
> BTW, you cant track any of us in this company by IP. because it looks like there is one IP address that is surfing a whole crapload of places.
Again, my p[arent post goes to great lengths to point out that I know that, and when we cant use cookies, we use IP addresses, which are inherently less accurate for the very reason you repeat for me.
Its funny, the combative tone some of these replies take. I have no problem with anyone blocking ad servers via proxies
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
to delete cookies to fix problems. when my dad couldn't get his bofa online account to work, the customer service rep told him to delete his cookies as well as the temporary internet files. and guess what, that did the trick!
HD Trailers
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.
1. Point your browser to Macromedia's Global Storage Settings Panel.
2. Drag the slider to "None". The setting seems to take effect immediately.
3. Click the last tab on the right, a picture of a folder with a green arrow pointing in.
4. Any sites that have already stored data locally will show a value in the "used" column. I had a few suspicious entries in mine which were instantly cleared by clicking "delete all".