Marketers Back "Cookies Are Good For You" Campaign

Makarand writes "The increasing numbers of computer users who regularly delete cookies downloaded by their browsers is worrying online marketers and Web site publishers who feel that the changing consumer attitude towards cookies is harming cookie usefulness and unfairly lumping them with spyware and viruses. This industry group wants to persuade companies making antispyware programs to spare legitimate cookies while sweeping hard drives clean of unnecessary or harmful files. Some marketers think that providing consumers more information about cookies and how they're used might change their attitudes towards cookies. Others are already busy experimenting with newer approaches to serve up targeted ads even if a user has deleted his cookies."

Comments

Also

[suso]

Brainlessly agreeing with what marketers say without seeking out more information is bad for you.

Not that I'm against cookies, I'm just against stupidity.

Re:Also

[B'Trey]

You're absolutely correct. But it's equally correct to brainlessly agree with what self proclaimed expert pundits say.

Cookies aren't evil. They're legitimate tools that are quite useful. Like many other tools, they can be abused or misused for nefarious purposes.

If you want to make your computer extremely safe, just unplug the network or phone cable or take out the wireless card. You're still vulnerable to local attacks, but you're absolutely safe from network attacks. Of course, this largely defeats the purpose of having the computer in the first place, but that's true to a lesser extent of other practices too.

Security is often a tug of war between being safe and usefulness or ease of use. Blindly blocking capabilities because it might be unsafe, without understanding what the dangers are, is often effectively conducting a denial of service on yourself.

Re:Also

[DavidTC]

You've just figured out the secret.

marketing==lying

Now, that doesn't mean everything they say is a lie. But their profession is to lie about products and services to get people to buy them, and hence it's probably wise to automatically distrust anything they say to start with until someone who's not a professional liar backs it up.

To those who are going to say that marketers tell the truth about products to people who don't know the truth...fuck that. That was true in 1955, and was called advertising. It's not true in 2005, and it's called marketing.

Okay ... someone give me a good reason why I ...

[DikSeaCup]

Would want a site to leave something identifying me on my hard drive if it isn't a site like slashdot or Geocaching.com where I simply just want to be logged into my customized site. Statistics? No! I don't want you tracking *my* behavior that way - use the log file like everyone else.

There are sites out there requiring a cookie to get past ads - you know I always give up at that point. I have never needed to see something under those cases.

So honestly - one of you cookie advocates give me a good reason to accept your cookie just because I want to visit a page on your site.

Re: Cookies off by default

[Black Parrot]

> I wonder if I'm one of the people worrying them. I have cookies off by default, and only turn them on for sites that really need them by whitelisting. Those that I don't want to use a cookie for but have to, I allow to set one but only for the session.

I don't even do that. With rare exceptions, if a site will not render without a cookie, I just close the tab and visit one of the billion other web pages on offer.

(I say this in hope that marketing types will be reading it.)

It's all about attitude

[kfg]

And realizing that cookies aren't spyware, but rather a means by which marketing companies gather and compile data about me on my own computer so that they more effectively target me with their advertising makes me more attitudinally inclined too. . .

Ummm, where's that nuke button again?

See, that's the problem with marketers. They like marketing and think it's a good thing, so they think we like marketing and think it's a good thing.

Whereas most of us think that Bill Hicks was being a bit of a soft hearted wuss in his displayed attitude toward them.

He simply called upon them to kill themselves. We want to roast them, slowly, while we watch.

Pass the beer.

KFG

Hmmm

[legirons]

"Other [marketers] are already busy experimenting with newer approaches to serve up targeted ads even if a user has deleted his cookies."

With attitudes like that, they wonder why people don't trust them?

These are the same people that discovered Flash could open popup windows even when you've disabled javascript. The same people that think nothing of attacking any security vulnerability they can find to display adverts. The same people that fill-up my "blocked webservers" list with dynamically-generated hostnames. The same people that put ActiveX controls with .exe files in hidden parts of a website, hoping to take control of their customers' computers.

Malicious use of anothers' computer without authorisation. Basically, "hackers" in the let's stop these criminals sense.

Marketers mindset

[Simonetta]

Just what is it about the people who have jobs in marketing that leads them to believe the public is something that they own? They seem to think that the 'market' is a giant ocean into which they are completely free to dip their nets or a giant forest through which they can just chop down the trees.

The market, or the public spaces on the web, is more like a holy space or temple that they, as recognized sleazy sinners, should enter in fear and humility, desperate to seek forgiveness for their arrogance, greed, and repulsiveness.

The idea that marketters should somehow be upset that ordinary web users would use software to keep them out of their computers is absurd. It's like rats complaining about homeowners putting up traps and poison to keep them out of the kitchen.

Marketing software 'cookies' are like rat droppings. Finding them on your PC is a sign that you could have serious health problems in your system unless you start to take serious steps to get rid of the source of the problem.

And, marketers who believe that they own you and your computer, is the source of the problem.

Re:Marketers mindset

[NickFortune]

They make their living by manipulating the public. You work like that, you get to see people as something to be manipulate. As objects

Worse in a way, it encourages the idea that everything in life is about public perception. It's not about the morality of the problem, it's about the publics perceived immorality.

And yeah, some times a perfectly good company or individual gets stuck with a bad name. Most of the time though, its about getting people to stop hating the client so said client can carry on shafting all and sundry without the public throwin rocks at them in the street.

You get people how think like that, then the cookie problem becomes "how can I make people think its ok for me to record their every web click, waster their online time and feed them intrusive advertising?" The question of wether something is actually ok is so far from their regular mindset, it never gets considered.

I dunno, there are probably some nice marketers. On the other hand, "by their fruits shall ye know them" and all that...

"Nothing happens until someone buys something"

[rhizome]

That's a sample from a marketing recording that Negativland once used
that is apt to be pointed out here.

>See, that's the problem with marketers. They like marketing and think
>it's a good thing, so they think we like marketing and think it's a
>good thing.

In an environment where everything is up to the consumer, everything
becomes the fault of the consumer as well. This myopia of never, ever
focusing attention on the methods and history of marketing and
advertising is a sign of their manipulative and authoritarian nature.

"There is a culture of fear in the marketplace" when it comes to
consumer attitudes toward cookies, says Nick Nyhan, president of New
York-based Dynamic Logic Inc.[snip]

He takes an attitude of empowerment (for lack of a better term) and
turns it into a fault. His statement is just as legitimate when
inverted to acknowledge the reasons why people delete cookies:

There is a culture of abuse in the advertising industry.

This is built in to the profession. Advertising doesn't work at all
unless you are manipulated. Case in point: calling this a problem of
"marketing," which is more "behind the scenes" and perhaps a bit
mysterious, and not "advertising," which is what puts the cookies on
your computer. Advertising is what everybody knows. Commercials are
easy to dislike, and they know it. This was the genius of Bill Hicks'
bit: including marketing.

Marketers, meanwhile, counter that cookies serve plenty of useful
features consumers may not realize -- such as automatically filling in
a username on a site that requires logging in, or helping a weather
site remember a ZIP Code so that it can show a local forecast on
return visits.

None of which has anything to do with marketing and the cookies that
*ads* place on your machine. Personally, Firefox is great for me here.
It deletes all of my cookies at the end of a session, and I've
whitelisted all of the sites that I use passwords for. Good cookies
stay, bad cookies leave. It's that simple, and by looking at my
browser's cookie cache it's easy to see which are the good cookies and
which are the bad.

Mr. Hughes and others want software makers to draw a big
distinction between spyware and cookies.

How about good cookies and bad cookies? No distinction? Tiny
distinction? By the previous example of using irrelevant registration
sites as a reason to trust advertising cookies, Mr. Hughes already
betrays his bias, that he is speaking for and responsible to bad
cookies. To acknowledge this distinction would implicate himself, and
he knows it because he doesn't mention it. Does he think that nobody
would notice?

Interviewer: Why should we keep cookies?
Mr. Hughes: Because sites use them for things other than advertising.
Interviewer: What about cookies used for advertising?
Mr. Hughes: [sound of crickets]

The company has begun marketing a technology known as a persistent
identification element, or PIE. The tool uses features in Macromedia
Inc.'s popular Flash software, which is used for designing and viewing
animated online ads, to secretly make backup copies of a user's
cookies before they are deleted. A handful of Web publishers and
advertising companies are using the technology to track users,
according to Mr. Tenembaum, though he declines to name them.

Call me nutty, but not being willing to name the companies who are
tracking users is not a good way to engender trust. What is this
article about again?

Re: Cookies off by default

[aftk2]

Heh, one of the exceptions being the site that you're posting on right now?

The real problem for marketers

[sjames]

If marketer's hadn't spent the last few decades making people feel as if they've been shot in the butt with a tranquilizer dart, poked, prodded, measured and sampled, then woke up with a tag affixed to their ear and a barcode tattoo on their forehead just for looking at an ad, perhaps more people might trust them today.

If marketers didn't spend so much time trying to figure out how to cram pop-up/under/over/whatevers down people's throats and how to track their every move through the web, often exploiting browser bugs in ways that would get them convicted if they were 15 and in school rather than mid 30's and marketers leading to many browser crashes and hogging a great deal of CPU/RAM (yes, the bugs shouldn't be there, but that doesn't grant a get out of jail free card), perhaps people wouldn't mind marketing so much.

If marketing would focus more on making sure new products ARE a great value and then letting people know rather than the current all too common mission of convincing people that bad to mediocre and overpriced products are somehow better than the competition's equally bad/mediocre overpriced products, perhaps people would be more inclined to listen to their message.

I have met marketers that really DO try to influence product design to give the people what they want and who really do want to tell the truth about a decent product, but unfortunatly, those don't seem to be in the majority anymore.

Of course, the absolute lowest is when a dozen or so PhDs in psychology gang up on 5 year olds to create reasonable (for a 5 year old) expectations that no product can possibly live up to.

Much like the legal profession, the marketing profession has come to be dominated by bottom feeders out to legally rob the public. No amount of "image rehabilitation" will improve their public image until they find a way to flush the bottom feeders out of the profession.