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

cookieisms

[sl4shd0rk]

The fact that people get assaulted with a barrage of cookie requests everytime they visit a website makes for a bit of an annoying visit. Ever try telling Firefox to ask before accepting a cookie? What the hell do I need so many cookies for when I visit "your" website? Also, with all the recent headlines about consumer information being mishandled makes people all the more wary. Capitalism cares nothing about privacy, only money.

Not just for ads

[stripmarkup]

Cookies are used for storing your session information and preferences for sites. That's what the mechanism was designed for, and so far nothing better has come up to replace it.

In terms of tracking your preferences, I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I don't like someone keeping track of my browsing preferences for unrelated sites. On another, I'd rather see ads that may interest me than yet another "punch the monkey" or "refinance your home". Most people hate ads because they are annoying and uninteresting to them, not because they are selling something. This is why Google is successful: they are good at improving the chances that the ad you see is related to what you are looking for.

Re:Also

[bigman2003]

I design a lot of intranet based applications. And I *used* to use cookies a lot to keep user information. It was easy, convenient, and accurate. I never had problems.

Then some whack job at my company started to tell everyone that cookies were 'dangerous' and they should block them. Of course then I started to get complaints that my systems no longer functioned. (I had it set up to notify the users what the problem was...not just throwing stupid errors.)

It was a total pain to reconfigure the systems to deal with url/form variables everywhere, instead of just using cookies. And now a lot of the user-friendly functionality is gone. "Why doesn't it remember who I am?" "Because you turned off cookies..."

Hundreds of hours of wasted time because one dork thought that cookies were spyware...and this is on an INTRANET site.

I really wish they could understand what cookies really are...

Here's one example

[tkrotchko]

Its commonly done in travel sites to maintain statefulness between page renders.

Statefulness matters because unlike store inventory, there's not really the concept of a shopping cart. You want to travel between point A->B, but your choices from page to page will depend entirely on what happens with inventory completely separate from the web site itself (I realize in re-reading this paragraph that this is almost incomprehensible, but still...).

Are there workarounds? Yes, but they're ugly, complicated, and unreliable, and require huge application servers, particularly when you have people coming from a mega-proxy like AOL.

And these cookies are typically gone when you leave the site. They're simply used to track where you are in the purchasing process. Its nothing personal.

Plus, I do find it handy that certain sites remember me, but that's more of a convenience factor.

I'm sure there are many other reasons.