Slashdot Mirror
Net Marketers Worried as Cookies Lose Effectiveness
Saint Aardvark writes "The Globe and Mail reports that Internet
marketers are worried about the decreasing persistence of cookies.
Almost 40% of surfers delete them on a monthly basis, says
Jupiter Research -- a fact one marketers attributes to incorrect associations with spyware and privacy
invasion. United
Virtualities' Flash-based tracking system is mentioned as a possible
substitute...though they don't mention the Firefox plugin that removes
them, or talk in any meaningful way about why people
might want cookies gone. Still, the article is a good overview of
life from the marketer's perspective."
Going to play the devil's advocate here, because I know how most of the rest of you feel:
.com a few years ago. I created a custom metrics program that intergrated into into our (also custom) ecommerce application. To track users, I gave them a single, persistant cookie that contained only a GUID. I used this information to determine our converstion ratio (number of visitors to buyers), figure out the top paths through the site, determine percentage of traffic that was return visitors, etc.
I used to be the web architect for a
All this stuff was entirely anonymous unless they purchased something from us. But, even then their site history was really only incidently linked to their contact info because we never correlated the data together. Why would I? Knowing that "John Smith" visited our site 3 times a week isn't really any more insightful that knowing that "User #5233258" visited us 3 times a week. The data was only useful in aggregate. For example, knowing that the last page 20% of people visited was our contact page, yet only 10% of those people actually submitted the form would make me reevaluate that page. Maybe the contact form wasn't very user friendly? So, I'd tweak it and then recompare the metrics.
The whole point of my tracking was to better serve our visitors and eventual customers. I wanted to make it easier for them to do what they came to our site to do. Or it would help us target our advertising for effectively. If a lot of people clicking through from a banner ad we had on Site A tended to buy Widget B, we'd decide to modify the banner ad to specifically highlight Widget B. Maybe my attitude is different than most, but I can't be unique. I never looked down upon our visitors, feeling that I was hearding cattle together to be slaughtered, or at least ripped off. Quite the opposite. These visitors wanted to be on my site, elsewise they wouldn't have dropped by. It felt pretty cool that so many people were coming to a site that I was responsible for managing. These people were supplying my paycheck and I had to make sure that they preffered our site to our competitors'. If a lot of visitors deleted that single cookie I used, that made that job much more difficult.
Does that still make me evil?
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Maybe now marketing companies will try to discover new ways of generating usage statistics beyond catching, tagging, releasing, and tracking innocent internet users via cookies. This could be an excellent opportunity for innovation in the space resulting in better privacy and better statistics.
If someone has money, you have no privacy.
Its a mircale that marketing firms are not claiming to 'own' the cookies and sue you if you delete them for destruction of property.
Cookies are delicious delicacies.
Didn't macromedia already put out an article on how to disable 'flash cookies'?
Just wait until they pay MS a bunch of money and IE comes with a cookie-type system you can't disable.
Since the marketeers want to use their cookies to spy on me, I'm not sure what's incorrect about those associations...
Try getting rid of cookies on a daily basis. I know of at least 2 people who used the "saved password" feature in IE6, and had their password stolen. I tell them to first use Firefox. Then I tell them to never save anything. Leave the smallest cookie/cache possible. Delete at will.
Hrm? They track you through the cookies, yet comparisons to "spyware" are unjustified?
I blame the Atkins craze for the sudden diminishing of cookies. On a side note, as a general rule, I'm pretty happy with any behavior that makes marketer's lives more difficult. Just one of those rules of thumb.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
People can complain all they want, but cookies are necessary to make surfing experiences less problematic. I'd rather be able to come back to a site and have it know my preferred settings, than have to always revert back to some default state.
Most people crying about privacy issues are just Chicken Littles.
the death of the Internet is imminent?
i don't like style guides
Maybe I don't get it (as I'm not a marketeer) but I'd say that associating tracking cookies with privacy invasion is quite appropriate.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I don't delete 'em. I log in to various sites that use them (that I want to use them), then I close the browser and then make the cookies.txt file read-only (chmod or chattr, or attrib). Get the benefit for sites I want the customizations on, don't get the tracking
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
What's a user's impetus to keep cookies around for more than a session? And if everyone followed security best-practices, they wouldn't even do that.
The fine grained site opt-in/session-based control of cookie lifespan has been let out of most browsers' Pandora's Box, and I can't see it going back in.
Many less technical people make no differentiation between cookies and spyware. When you are told you need to run three anti-spyware programs to get most, but still not all, of the spyware out afflicted users just get very intolerant. People are changing their habits because of spyware, that's how sick they are of it.
only incidently linked to their contact info because we never correlated the data together ...
Does that still make me evil?
Yep.
If you have the *ability* to do it, then somebody in your organization eventually will decide that it sounds like a good idea.
This is why all my browsing is cookie-free (or rather, cookies being allowed on a whitelist basis and everything else removed on browser shutdown). I don't want you to have that ability to track what I do on your site for very long. Regardless of whether you use that ability or not, I don't trust you to behave properly with that information. Why should I? I don't know you.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Seems like there was some lobbying effort once upon a time to make them the company's property. Obviously it did not get anywhere. Or maybe I'm dreaming, but I could swear I remember something along these lines in the past...
Thanks! I just deleted all cookies from FireFox :D
However, I find cookies very dangerousness on Public computer located in cyber cafes and libraries; so it is best to delete them.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
Flash-based tracking system is mentioned
It doesn't seem to have dawned on marketers that many, many people already associate Flash with "annoying advertising", "high CPU usage for nothing" and "general nuisance", and that it is disabled in many browsers as a consequence.
Speaking for myself, Flash is disabled. When I need it occasionally (that is, when I happen to want to play this about once a year), I re-enable it. But otherwise, I've yet to see a website sporting Flash that doesn't use it for useless eye-candy or advertising.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Cookies were intended to allow sites to serve users by providing a convenient method of preserving client-side state.
They're intended to do legitimate things like let a site remember who you are so you don't need to log in every time you visit it, or assign a transaction code to make it easy for things like shopping carts to work... and prevent you from double-ordering if you click the "Order" button twice.
They were never intended for the purposes to which marketers have misappropriated them.
It's just another example of information being ostensibly collected for a purpose the user approves of, and then being secretly used for purposes the user is unaware of and might not approve of, and it justifiably makes people angry.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
a good overview of life from the marketer's perspective
I'll be interested when the overview of life from the marketer's perspective is "OH GOD IT BURNS IT BURNS MAKE IT STOP PLZ!!"
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Nothing warms the cockles of my heart like hearing a spammer bleating about how it's the user's fault a broken model of electronic commerce isn't working.
The same United Virtualities that caused me to enter into my hosts file because it kept crashing firefox (1.03 with FlashBlock 1.2.9)?
127.0.0.1 sp21.unitedvirtualities.com
I can't wait.
If you blog it...
I think that his complaints are mostly on target - the problem is with his perspective. He thinks that the users "owe" him the ability to effortlessly track them.
This is simply a variation on an ancient marketing problem. How do I get people to see what I want to sell and convince them that they need it. The only difference is the technical context.
KK4SFV
Judging by the size of the average American belly, I can't see how cookies have lost their effectiveness.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
How do I signup on the Federal Do Not Cookie List?
Still, the article is a good overview of life from the marketer's perspective.
I came to this website in good faith based on its publicised Immature rating, and now I find that clicking a link can unlock disgusting insights into a marketer's perspective. Children reading this could become desensitised to marketing and then go on a marketing spree themselves. Wait until Hillary hears about this.
And this is a good thing, make no mistake! I don't exist simply to be prey for marketers, regardles of how they may want to feel about it! Anything that disrupts them is good.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Philip Kotler et al: Principles of Marketing.
There is ONE thing you should learn of that 850 pages book:
4P: Product, Price, Promotion, Place .
If you don't have all of them, you aren't going to get your product sold - unless the rest of the market is even worse. When are actually "marketers" trying to get me to buy their products with something else than Promotion (ie commercials)?
------------
#ifdef Flame_RIAA
The record companies are among the worst here. They only have one right, and three totally wrong. They do get the "promotion" part. But the other three...
Product: we want decent non-DRM digital files, not plastic pieces or DRM shit.
Price: Too expensive. Pirating is gratis (except for the unusual catch of **AA).
Place: You insensitive record company clods, we want to buy our music online, with instant delivery through download!
#endif
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
"Life from the marketer's perspective" goes something like this, perhaps?
... ... ... ... ... ...
Exploit others
Exploit others
Exploit others
Gotta pee
Exploit others
Oooh! Something shiny!
HR 2281
I assume this has long since been defeated. Otherwise it would "prevent computer users from protecting their privacy online by removing cookies from their computer. Additionally, if cookies are used as a copyright protection system it would be unlawful to manufacture a device that removes the cookie from the system."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/18/131024 3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/18/131024 3&tid=95&tid=187&tid=98
Maybe the difference could be that they are tracking/monitoring/whatever your usage on their site vs. spyware that tracks your overall usage. I'm not sure if I'd mind them knowing that I prefer page X on their site. Its a lot different then spyware watching all my activities and generalizing my usage for potential advertisers to exploit.
How many visitors are on an old dial up connection or connecting via proxy? I.P. numbers simply aren't a reliable way of providing usage statistics.
Even the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street has been forced to admit, "Cookies are a SOMETIMES thing!"
Most antispyware utilities also remove tracking cookies by default, and most users never change the defaults, so tracking cookies are being removed. If there wasn't so much truly dangerous spyware out there today, the nuisance caused only by tracking cookies wouldn't be the effort to fix. But as long as users bought something that cleans it all up they're going to use it.
Also, unscrupulous antispyware companies are sometimes using tracking cookies to scare users into buying something. Just put "spyware" into Google and look at the ads, then run one of their free scans. The more they detect, the more they scare users, and the better their chances of making a sale.
What it comes down to for both spyware and cookies is the same thing. What is the benefit TO THE USER of having this stuff on their computer? If there is none then it should be gone and the marketeers should figure out a better incentive.
Every once in awhile I like to toy with the cookies. I'll edit their content - flip some bytes, add lots of corrupt text, delete sections. Occasionally, I'll flip all the cookies to "Read Only". Its fun to see a site occasionally puke from bogus cookie data.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
I thought the point of deleting cookies was to screw up marketing and people leaving pieces of themselves on your computer that you don't want?
And PSP UMD disks were never intended to illegitmate things like porn. And PSP was never intended to play MAME. People should never misappropriate things, they should only do things that are strictly in accordance with the original author's world view.
[suitwank]
I don't want a relationship with an online vendor. I don't want a relationship with a car salesman. I just want to be shown a product and given a price. I'll decide if I want it.It's tough enough getting rich without people hiding. Don't those cookie-deleters know that it's all about relationships? What do they think, we'll sell information about them to a spammer? We use only legitimate email marketers.
[/suitwank]
I don't mind good service, but that's not what the suitwankers want to do with my information. They uniformly want to sell me something I don't want. Remember what I bought so you can fix it if it breaks or I want an upgrade, but don't try to sell me something just because I bought something else.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Why should I? I don't know you
Do you know your bank? I mean apart from the front-end office that takes your money?
Do you know VISA, AMEX, Mastercard or whatever credit card you use?
If you have the *ability* to do it, then somebody in your organization eventually will decide that it sounds like a good idea.
And this is paranoia on crack... it assumes that people will ALWAYS do the wrong thing and will ALWAYS try and screw you about, and that customer profiling NEVER results in a better service.
Feel happy in your paranoia, me I just assess risk on a site by site, and business by business basis.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm sure that you're not suggesting that you buy things from websites that you dont trust....
Why not? Buying things online means, at worst, giving out info from a credit card. If they prove untrustworthy, then I call up the credit card company and reverse the charge. Trust does not have to be involved to engage in a purchase. You buy from people you don't any basis of trust for all the time.
However, WTF would he need to know I came back to his site later? WTF would he need to know that I visited his site several times over a period of a week and eventually purchased something? Why would he need to know what products I looked at each of those times I visited? That information could be used to build up information about me that I might not want him to have. He doesn't have need for that information, and since I don't trust him, I should attempt to deny him the ability to collect that information.
Furthermore, if he's a marketer, he can place his ads on several sites and track me via cookies from site to site. He can see what sites I frequent, he can see my reading habits... once I buy something from a site, he can track that and correlate all this to my identity.
I'm not paranoid, because I don't think anybody is actually doing this sort of thing at the moment. However, the capability is there. I remove cookies to make this sort of thing that much harder to accomplish. Not because I think they are doing it, but because the potential is there for them to do it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"That cookie shit makes me nervous."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Nothing really new here...
Marketers Back "Cookies Are Good For You" Campaign
great... I hope no marketing firms read this thread.
I never understood the paranoia surrounding cookies.
Without cookies, browsing the web would be slow frustrating. I dont want to enter my pw everytime i read slashdot for example. So it's saved, and has been since 1998 or 99.
Everytime I backup files, my cookies are also backed up. I have cookies from as early as 1997.
Occasionally i'll go through them and delete the ones i no longer need or the ones that belong to sites that no longer exist. I'll also delete ad server tracking cookies (although i rarely have any since i filter all web sites and strip them of ads), but to delete all your cookies once a month seems insane.
Then again, some people format their computers once a year or so and could care less about starting over, whereas I have obsessive compulsive disorder and cant stand change so I take screenshots my desktop and different menus and printouts of directory listings, etc so that whenever i do start over i can get it looking EXACTLY the same as it did before, even if that means creating empty directories just to keep the tree looking the same
ok maybe im crazy so my points dont matter to most people, but dammit cookies arent evil!
Earlier this week, I read Nabisco is having the same problem with entire batches of Oreos.
Yes.
The reason for yes is because you are advocating sane uses for cookies. The marketers complaining about the loss of their cookies aren't complaining because they can't tweak their site as easily. They're complaining because they feel -- rightly or wrongly -- that they are more effective when they can track customers regardless of how the customers themselves feel about it!
The customers are voting with their feet, or in this case their Cookie Cutters. 40% are already so annoyed at how the Internet treats them that they delete their cookies at least once a month in the hope that this will reduce the insulting behavior at least a bit. And if 40% are actually doing it, you can bet that more would if they knew effectively how to do so.
So yes you are evil for advocating the keeping of a tool that is being misused to annoy many customers while seeking out gulible ones to take advantage of. It has got to be an low-numbered rule of business that you don't succeed by annoying your customers so much that they attempt to change their behavior to avoid further such annoyances.
You got your answer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Almost 40% of surfers delete them on a monthly basis, says Jupiter Research -- a fact one marketers attributes to incorrect associations with spyware and privacy invasion.
We really want to track where you've been but IT'S not spyware or privacy invasion. Really!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
...just ask sessions. I think there needs to be a term defining the difference between reality and the responses on Slashdot. Of course computer nerds are going to be up in arms about using cookies to track info, the rest of the planet, however, is wondering why a computer site has an article referring to baked goods.
Some cookies are reasonable to accept because they actually do help keep track of client-side status during a website visit. Or even repeated visits. A cookie which persists more than a few months or even a few weeks probably outlives any utility as a status tool. Why, then, do websites continue to try to get me to accept cookies which have five or ten or even thiry year lifespans? I automatically reject cookies which are set to live longer than I probably will.
No, the effectiveness of cookies is being threatened by your using them for a purpose they were never intended -- stalking me. I won't have it.
They're not YOUR cookies, they're MINE. The ability to leave a "tiny text file" on my computer was put there for MY benefit, not yours.
Cookies hold passwords for some sites. My cookies holding my passwords. Others hold information about how I want the page displayed.
Using my cookies to sleazily stalk me for the purpose of marketing isn't why I've enabled them.
"The more people that delete cookies, and the more frequently that cookies are deleted, the more it will adversely affect campaign performance," echoes Jay Aber, president of ad network 24/7 Canada Inc.
So tell me, Jay, why should I give a flying fuck? Why should I not jump for joy at this news?
I don't want to be measured. As to "limiting the number of times a consumer sees a specific ad," that's just laughable. How many times have I seen the mortgage dacghsun(sp)?
So he has one brain cell left. Look, Peterson, we don't WANT to be tracked, targeted, or stalked for marketing "their surfing habits and preferences."
Get the hell OUT of my computer.
"...places Macromedia Flash MX files on users' computers that can't be as easily deleted"
That's just plain evil. Burn in hell, scum.
Amount of porn on the internet ~ People downloading it ~ Amount of cookies being deleted on a monthly basis
I hear many people complaining about EVIL marketers. Most marketing companies are rather decent people trying to find you the customer who wants their product. A VERY small % of marketing companies are shady info-whoring bastards. Targetted marking is a rather nice thing as far as I am concerned. When offered to provide interests, and the resulting ads, I find myself visiting the link. WHAT I HATE is misdirected market, you know assholes that call you about new siding on your house when you live in an apartment, or my favorite (being a married old fart) getting ads for tapons and crap like that (because the wife occassionally does some surfing under my ID).
It's too bad a small group, as usual, ruins it for the majority.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Take a look in your cookies pref page / file. Look at the expiration dates. I've found a huge percentage of sites, especially advertisers, use a date at least 10 years in the future.
I'm unlikely to be using the same computer in 3-4 years, much less 10. Some sites even go for "2040". WTF? What's the point? If I don't visit your site within 6 months, I'm unlikely to gripe too much about having to reenter a username/password...so why are you making my system store a cookie for you for a couple decades?
Please help metamoderate.
My favorite quote from the original story (and probably the same exact study) was from Eric Peterson of Jupiter Research:
"If consumers adopted a friendlier attitude toward cookies, the Internet would be a better place overall."
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I went to a clothing store a few years ago to buy a present for the wife. I handed the cashier cash for the items, then had the following conversation -
... ... ...
Cashier: May I have your phone number?
Me: No.
Cashier: It's only for customer satisfaction purposes
Me: What part of "no" was ambiguous?
Cashier: We need your phone number to improve customer service
Me: Get your manager over here right now so I can explain why you're losing this sale, and all future sales
Cashier: {types in store phone number}
I get amazingly cheesed when businesses fail to respect my privacy (whether I have a "right" to privacy is a whole separate rant.)
The fact that they can tell how many are being deleted, and state that they are for tracking pretty much indicates that they are not incorrectly associated with spyware, doesn't it?
To me that sort of defines spyware. It might be low tech, there might be better out there, but they are spying on us.
I set my Firefox to manually ask to approve and deny cookie settings for every site I visit. (not each individual cookie, but the cookie policy for the site -- accept, reject, or temporary) Why should I let some random site set a cookie if I only want one-time information from it?
Sites that have proved their value to me will be allowed cookies -- others that I derive no benefit from cookies I deny right off, and may get a chance if I want later.
I realize I'm probably a more control-oriented user/compulsive type, but this is how I like it. Sites that bother me most are the ones that redirect you to other domain names and hide the relevant cookie information from you when you need to decide whether or not to change the permissions. And sites that just say "turn on all cookies" for them to work. Look, I don't want to accept *all* cookies. Just tell me which domains to turn on to make things work for your particular site...
And depending on how they're assigned, they may well know your actual address as well, just from the number.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
but I really don't give a flying FUCK what marketers think or how skipping cookies and advertising is "hurting" them.
I don't want advertising. I don't want to be marketed to. Leave me the FUCK alone.
Come to think of it, I'm not sorry to say it. We've put up with invasive advertising & tracking for "marketing purposes to increase our click-through ROI" crap for way too long.
As I am sure most of you will agree, people are learning to delete their cookies because most of us don't want to be tracked everywhere we go (in the real world this is called stalking). If the advertizers had policed themselves and did reasonable things with cookies, it wouldn't have become a problem. However, a few bad apples decided to do all sorts of things that any reasonable person would find offensive, and since Windows has a pitiful mechanism for managing cookies (by design I am sure) the quick fix is to simply delete them.
So quit bitching and change your ways, cause we aren't going to take it anymore.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
They abused phone calls, and that brought about the national Do Not Call list.
They abused TV commercials, and that brought about "commercial skip" VCRs and TiVo.
They abused pop-ups, and that brought about pop-up blockers.
They abused Flash to make more attention-getting (read: obnoxious) banner ads, and that brought about Flashblock.
They abused cookies, now people obsessively delete them if they allow them to be created at all.
Am I the only one who sees a pattern here?
~Philly
I keep 3rd party cookies blocked... that keeps everything nice and clean.
For the layman, the way these tracking cookies work is when you're visiting site A, site A has a banner from site Z. If you have 3rd party cookies enabled, not only can site A set a cookie to your harddrive, so can site Z. Now, you go to site B which also uses site Z's ads... and site Z can see you were also at site A. Block 3rd party cookies however, and you cant get a cookie from site Z unless you actually VISIT site Z.
Disabling 3rd party cookies lets you keep their useful functions (login information at ebay, etc) and restrict the illegitimate ones (tracking my useage).
Mike Healan from Spywareinfo.com has a good article about cookies and their spyware-esque function here: http://www.spywareinfo.net/july20,2005#cookies
To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer
My default browser (opera) has the flash-plugin disabled. It is also configured to throw away any cookie on exit.
In those (rare) cases i want to open a flash-based web page, i just run Firefox. Obviously, also the "Red Panda" is configured to not to store any cookies after a session.
And... er... yes i don't use Whinedows.
As a small time webmaster with only intermediate programming experience (with the "P" languages), let me say this is a total non issue. If we want to track you, we will track you. If you turn off cookies, we'll just put a unique ID in every single link and form of the page we serve you. This ID will be implanted in every single link on the next page, and so on. Since increasingly whole sites are generated via database on the fly, this is not hard to do. It's just one extra param in each CGI-style GET or POST (except with mod_perl mod_php mod_python or J2EE it's way faster than CGI and we can do URL rewriting so it won't be obvious).
And by the way, it is increasingly cheap to share this information with third parties. It used to be a big slowdown to communicate with other webservers (like those owned by marketing companies) over http using protocols like SOAP or XML-RPC. With processing, memory and bandwidth cheaper than ever, it's not a big issue to send your tracking information behind the scenes, further eliminating the need for tracking cookies.
By turning off your cookies, you are simply making a little tougher to track you, ensuring only that larger more sophisticated sites can operate with viable business plans. So in "protecting your privacy" you are actually squeezing out small and marginal media competitors and preserving the Web for large corporations. Congrats!
If they know their customers a little better...
:P
But they don't know me. They will never know me.
"Knowing me" means knowing my name, shaking hands, asking me about things we've discussed in the past. That's being friends with somebody. That's knowing them. That's what your idea of the "clerk who recognizes your face" is about, no? The little guy running the corner market, sort of thing.
Some dude running a website on the opposite side of the country will never know me. At best, he'll know what I've bought from him and other website owners that he shares information with or advertises with. Knowing what I buy doesn't mean he "knows me". It means he's treating me as an impersonal entity to be exploited, somebody to attempt to get more money from. It doesn't mean he's treating me as a fellow human being deserving of respect and friendship.
No, fuck that, I'll remain a stranger to that guy across the country running a website, and I'll know the guy who sells me my fresh fruit down on the corner market, and I'm quite comfortable with that and don't see it as a conflict whatsoever.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Just set up your browser to store your cookies on a ramdisk. Then, at least twice a day, your cookies will be cleaned out while you are rebooting the machine.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
Could someone develop a "prepackaged" cookies folder to make marketing data useless? For example, copy useless (or altered) info into Clickit, Webtracker or some other notorious cross domain cookie file. And then install this into your browser once a month. Anyone who is a developer or savvy with these things, I would like to know is this feasible or practical? Would it have an impact?
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
No, it doesn't make you -evil-. It may make you an obstacle. This case is no different than other types of customer shopping/purchasing metrics, both web-based and physical. Like Radio Shack collecting phone numbers, or CVS handing out discount cards like penny candy. I don't want it from them, either.
The biggest problem here is "when is there a presumption of innocence?" In your case, since you are doing nothing nefarious, you wish to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, there has been a -consistent-, -systematic- trend toward greater and greater abuses of customer personal information by businesses.
Given this fact, many people, myself included, have chosen to presume that businesses that wish to track -any- information, no matter how innocuous it may seem, are up to no good, and actively prevent it.
You can no longer rely on -being innocent- to give you an expectation that customers will treat you as innocent. Like a repeat mugging victim, your customers have developed a highly suspicious nature. Too bad if your resemblance to the guy who mugged them before is a coincidence. They are going to view you with suspicion, regardless of what you may do in future.
It's unfortunate for you. But no one is going to weep for you. We are more concerned about our own, congoing pain.
You state: "To track users, I gave them a single, persistant cookie that contained only a GUID." Terrific; as anonymous as it gets. One problem; every browser I know of asks somthing like, "Site example.com wishes to set a cookie. Do you wish to accept?" It never tells me, "...and the entire contents of the cookie is a GUID, used solely for nonspecific statistical purposes. It is not tied to any identifying information about you."
And, in truth, it can't. Because a GUID like that -can- be tied to other information stored on the server and used for tracking. I don't know what your server is doing, and even if you told me, I would not be likely to believe you. Like the telemarketers who call my home asking for donations for charities, I am -bombarded- with constant requests, and do not have the time to examine each one to determine if they are legitimate. So I do the expedient thing, and assume that they are fraudulent.
I do the same with cookies. Unless I see a reason to allow them, I say "block it". And I allow only -session- cookies by default.
Sorry if this sounds cold. It sucks for you, but that's really not my problem.
re:below
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
What version of Windows are you using?
mod this one as a troll...
Paranoid tinfoil hat crowd say Y here, everyone else say N.
That isn't assessing risk on a case by case basis, its ASSUMING high risk and contravention and only later opening up.
Assessing risk on a case by case basis would mean you think both +ve and -ve and get to an answer. Saying NO! everytime just indicates that you are either paranoid or work in Microsoft desktop support.
But removing persistent cookies isn't a "NO!" response. A NO! would be blocking cookies entirely. That's my -ve position.
My +ve position is whitelisting, allowing persistent cookies.
But my neutral position is the default one. Allowing persistant cookies, but changing them into session cookies (essentially). This allows all the persistant cookie crap to actually work properly, but doesn't allow the person to track me across sessions. That's the "don't know yet" position. When I have enough info to know, then I either block or allow the site to set cookies.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Now they're abusing DVDs by putting unskippable ads on those. It remains to be seen what the backlash from that one will be, but probably either people will stop buying them, or the Asian commodity consumer electronics companies will start (if they haven't already) cranking out DVD players that ignore previously-unskippable crap or let you skip it.
~Philly
"Good"
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Too bad if the marketers don't like that people delete cookies.
Companies like doubleclick and the ones who seem to only serve up annoying advertising have no expectation that I will a) accept their cookie (if you're not the site I'm visiting, why do you get a cookie?) or b) even if I did accept their cookie, that I would keep it.
The real world would be tagging your clients. Someone comes in to browse, you snap an ear collar on him. You walk into another store, someone wants to stamp the back of your hand indicating that you've shopped there.
I had a person at my door asking if I'd received my flyers -- when I told her than if I had I'd tossed them in the bin, she wanted my name and phone number. What part of I'm not interested in your flyer, and you don't need my contact info to respond to this?
I wouldn't accept K-Mart putting a radio tracking collar on me, WTF do on-line marketers think they're any different?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Troll? You mean like this recent posting of yours?
Quote:
"The G5 is a joy to use. I wish I could say the same for other friends/family still under the iron grip of another, unamed, OS vendor."
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
Companies collect this information in aggregate, nobody cares about you and the few pages you looked at unless they have data for thousands of other people as well.
I agree, however, do you think they throw this data away after they have their aggregate information? No, because they might want to sort it by some other thing later and draw different info from it.
So all that raw data is lying around somewhere. And if I happen, later down the line, to piss somebody with access to that data off (this is not as much of a long shot as you might think, I piss a lot of people off regularly) then they might go mining that data for info about me to use against me in some fashion.
Now yes, that is a little paranoid... But it's so simple to eliminate that entirely by simply muddying up the data trail that it's a simple cost-benefit thing. It costs me nothing to muddy up the data a bit, and the potential benefit is small, but more than nothing. So QED, might as well do it. It hurts me not in the slightest to do just that.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
*deletes cookies*
is a rider on the next Iraq spending bill that makes deleting cookies and blocking popups illegal.
"Honey? What's this file from www.chicks-doing-farm-animals.com?"
Should web marketers really be surprised that constantly tagging people and most of the time and giving them no benefit at all makes them nervous? What if you had your hand stamped with invisible ink every time you went into a store, and received nothing for it? How many people would want to allow that?
The thing is that these marketers want something for nothing. I enable the "ask for each cookie" option in mozilla, and generally click "allow for session" on 99% of most sites because they offer me NOTHING in return for tagging me. On sites like Amazon.com I can add things to my wish list without logging in, or on slashdot I can login without typing in passwords. Tvguide.com will show me my local listings, cool. I've gotten a benefit from the site knowing who I am, so I'm much more likely to allow them to know that.
Most sites that hand out cookies give you nothing for identifying you. Why should I give them somthing they want for nothing? I certainly don't trust the average marketer to not do skeevy things like targeted pricing (looks like I visit bmw.com a lot.. I must be rich. Raise my prices by 10%).
AccountKiller
So they didn't actually lose the sale, you sir are a paragon of consumer advocacy.
And that is why they do this...
IMHO, cookies were intended to make web sites stateful, not people.
:-p
If you make your pretty network of ad servers to track my steps, to me that's abusing the rights I give you to store data on my computer, and I act accordingly. Store info for your site alone to make it stateful and directly enhance the services it can provide me, and I won't. One may say "but without ads, our services will get worse", but in that case I'd like your competition as a web site with the rest of the world speak. And so far I'm seeing little to no proof that an ad ridden site is an excellent site, anyway. I think there's almost no relationship, personally.
They should be happy users have been relatively clueless for this long instead.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
A client/server system without persistent client state is unuseably crippled. Cookies are a simple way to get that. If users are flushing them once a month, but need not, they must be balancing the convenience of persistence with their perceived "privacy". If just the marketers are complaining, I don't care. When the engineers complain that no persistent client state is crippling our apps, then I care.
Marketers could stop complaining, and fund better UIs that decrease the false perception that cookies are bad. Their stealth makes them sinister, and their unmanageability makes people throw out the benign majority with the tiny malign minority. But only a generation of marketdroids could taint the deep-seated pleasant associations with "cookies" into fear of deadly poison. If they rechanelled their complaints into better UIs, they'd be "engineers", not marketdroids. So they're doomed. If only they were as doomed as the cookies they mourn.
--
make install -not war
You're just not cooking them with enough of the magic butter.
Asking for your phone number is too personal, but many stores as for your ZIP code. I freely hand out my ZIP code. I figure that giving accurate geographic/demographic info to stores I like (why else would I be shopping there?) helps me in the long run.
Though I am annoyed by gas station pumps that ask for my ZIP code to improve credit card security. I once made a typo when entering my ZIP code and yet my credit card was not rejected. Liars.
cpeterso
I hand out my ZIP code. It's 12121. They usually think I'm making it up.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
Good point. At least you don't live in ZIP code 12345 (Schenectady, NY)!
cpeterso
agreed. Best Buy has been doing this for some time. The clerk said she had to have my phone number and I said that she didn't. Turned out she was wrong and I was right. Still left the store without purchasing.....oh shit!
Duh!!! She was asking for my phone number!!!
**Idiot**
Gotta get back to Best Buy.
Later
If I said "no", what would be your next point?
It sounds like you're laying the foundation for a claim that cookie deletion deprives you and your family of income.
From there, you can try and make a case that visitors to a site have a moral, and possibly legal, obligation not to delete cookies. (If that sounds far fetched, someone actually tried it on with me the last time this topic came up).
The fact that you restricted your use of cookies to ethical activities does not mean that others are similarly restrained. It's the others that brought cookie use in disrepute, and it is for their benefit that so many people have taken to deleting cookies.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Still, the article is a good overview of life from the marketer's perspective.
You got anything written from the vampire's point-of-view?
Oh, right. You already said "marketer's".
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
1. We live in a world where it is not an option not to buy things.
2. We live in a world where corporations exist only to make as much money as possible, regardless of how that happens (and no matter how much they try to tell you otherwise).
3. We live in a world where companies will use knowledge they have gained from tracking me to make me pay more money than I have to pay. Online and offline.
I went to his competitor up the street, bought the same printer. I told the story to the store manager there, who had a nice laugh and was happy to get my money.
[X] Only accept cookies from originating server
[X] Automatically accept session cookies
Default Policy
(X) Ask for confirmation
( ) Accept all cookies
( ) Reject all cookies
This allows me to sort the wheat from the chaff. After a while, my cookie preferences stiffarm the tracking cookies to the point that I don't have to react to every cookie thrown at me.
Fuck 'em.
> Most marketing companies are rather decent people trying to find you the customer who wants their
> product. A VERY small % of marketing companies are shady info-whoring bastards.
Yes and no. Part of the problem is "what is decent." Some people, myself included, believe in an absolute moral standard.
But a large number of people use a relative standard. A lot of the marketing folks who are not 'evil', but not angels by any stretch, justify their actions by comparing themselves to other marketers.
A lot of us don't feel the majority of marketers are as benevolent as you seem to. Not because they're 'evil', but because they refuse to follow absolute standards, and they refuse to live with the consequences of failing to meet these standards; a lost customer.
> Targetted marking is a rather nice thing as far as I am concerned. When offered to provide
> interests, and the resulting ads, I find myself visiting the link.
I haven't seen any marketing targeted well enough to warrant even a single useful look.
> WHAT I HATE is misdirected marketing
Agreed. But the reality is, even when I provide the data they want, I fall into the cracks. I am an atypical person, who doesn't fit any of the standard pigeonholes. From my standpoint, -all- targeted marketing is misdirected marketing. Not for everyone, but for me.
I suspect many people have had similar experiences.
...if you annoy me you've lost even the vague possibility of a sale.
It's a myth that there is no such thing as bad advertising. Product name recognition works both ways. For me, I can easily remember why I don't buy from some sources.
The "data" obtained by the methods described is very low grade and often totally useless.
And in other news, Internet marketers are worried that people don't seem to like the marketing efforts being made towards them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Here's how I handle it:
Cashier: May I have your phone number?
Me: Sure! It's $(friend's ex-wife's phone number), and I'll love to hear more about other promotions you may have in the future.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Way back in 2000, I asked them what they were going to do when people wised up and started deleting cookies in greater numbers, and they just looked at me like I had three heads.
I used to use my root account to lock my user account's /home/myusername/.kde/share/http/
/var/tmp/kdecache-username/http folder and selectively delete cookies.
/http folder and issuing makedir http. KDE (I suppose it's KDE) recreates the single-letter folders, less w and a few others as they are needed. I look for and purge x10 stuff, doubleclick bullshit, and more.
/var/tmp/, the user account and more.
path so the even ***I*** could not edit the cookie folder on a whim. That is, unless I logged into root via the console. After a while, the system seemed to degrade, or maybe it was only that user account. I'd actually gotten accustomed to really shitty page refreshes, site visits and so on.
But, I like to believe I have a malevolent opposition to most cookies. Now, I use Konqueror AND Firestarter blocking lists to keep cookies at bay. I also tend, now, to got to the
Recently, I read about Web Beacons and then realized I'd used to be concerned about them, but got sloppy or lazy. It seems that web beacons are 1x1 pixels/buttons that alert a sender of Http traffic/e-mail that a page or a message was viewed. Purportedly, it doesn't do anything else, but to me, a "beacon" can beacon to another beacon, and eventually, a crude form of tracker or even a keystroker could be in play.
Am I paranoid? I don't think so. But, I still delete cookies, wholesale by lopping off the
The problem I see, by us talking openly about this is that assholes in some cartel or lobbyist group will try to make it illegal to tamper with cookies since some laws require some businesses to "Know Thy Customer", or between mshaft, marketers, and others, we'll all be collectively screened and denied access to sites that actually need the ad revenues.
Well, I don't mind some sites sending me a cookie. I just delete the bitch before I move on to another site. It's not just that you need to delete the cookies when closing the browser, or making sure the settings are set for "Make cookies session cookies". No, one cookie could be a beacon or bot or crawler, and by the time you shut down the browser, the b, b, or c has already done its job of relaying your movements, queries, and so on.
If the bot-fiends pull a fast one and secret the cookies and bots and beacons and crawlers to places too difficult to cleans, then we need the Open Source and even Closed Source/proprietary browsers to log each and every action the browser and the subsystems calls sent so the user can malevolently hunt down and KILL those bbbcc's before moving on to another site or page within a site.
I am sick and TIRED of hearing apologists or site admins say "We need the cookie to make sure you are who you claim to be, and to make sure you get the pages you asked for." Well, goddammit, set up session numerics that are in the BROWSER URL line, but don't sequester or secret them to my machine in some encrypted manner that obfuscates what you're UP TO. The only encrypted cookies I expect are from BANKS or merchants with whom I make a transaction or purchase. Any OTHER cookies are my own damn fault if I don't delete during or after a session. If someone steals my machine, or keystrokes it, they'll find out anyway if I don't delete the browser history, the
I guess the next step will be for us all to have Read Only surfing machines to force cookies back where they (or almost all of them) belong: on the SITE SERVER, not the visiting client.
If your site is good enough, people will come back again and again, until something else dominates their attention, which will almost ALWAYS be the case, with the exception of, say, the major portals of news and email.
Oh, yeh, I realize that encrypted cookies might reduce the in-transit risk posed by MITM attacks, but many sites don't rise to the level of secrecy that demands encrypted cookies.
Wow, another dictionary word anti-script image.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
My ability to make up fake phone numbers is almost a brainstem response. I accidentally told a mortgage officer a fake phone number once, then had to do the lame, "Uhhh, wait that's my old number" thing.
Whenever someone asks for info they don't need, lie. It's the only safe thing to do. I hit one of those surveys where they ask you for your computer password in exchange for a 5 dollar gift certificate.
They said, "We'd like to offer you a free gift certificate for coffee in exchange for your password."
And I said, "What a coincidence, my password is 'Il1k3fr33c0ff33'." I'm not sure they got it, but I got my fr33 c0ff33.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Cookies were not intended for the uses that internet marketers abuse them for. If my location bar says foo.com I don't want cookies for 10 other sites, and I don't need them--Only the marketers need them. They're just another way to annoy the user, without the user knowing about it until later, when the marketdroids can achieve the horror portrayed in Minority Report.
If enough of the data pointed to by cookies in various tracking databases can be assembled, there's yet another avenue for identity theft, I bet.
I've never seen a legitimate reason for cookies to persist more than a few months. Cookies that last until 2037 are just begging to be denied.
Also, Spybot and AdAware both delete cookies from IE that are malware related. The people responsible for those can simply go f*ck themselves.
I am a developer of site analytics software, and I make major decisions on the featureset and development, so I think I'm qualified to speak from this side of things.
Most of the discussion I'm seeing is "let those dirty marketing bastards choke on this!" As if the sole purpose for using cookies is malicious and couldn't actually be beneficial to both sides.
First off, if you really believe large coorporations are analyzing each of the individual millions of visitors they get each day to try to identify them personally, wringing their hands and laughing manicly in backrooms as they discuss all the ways to scam money out of you, you are a true paranoid and should seek counseling immediately. You would have to hire an entire staff who's sole purpose was to attempt to make personal connections between hundreds, thousands, even millions of tracked data and the real person, which is usually impossible, unless that visitor has registered with personal information to the site anyway, in which case the visitor obviously feels comfortable enough to let the company know who they are in the first place, and it doesn't really do that company any good to go through their specific records to see everything they did on the site... there's no benefit I can identify with doing that! It'd be EXTREMELY time consuming and probably wouldn't be effective.
In cases with large coorporations it's impossible to find a valid reason to sift through each and every visitor to see what they did and how they could be exploited... utter rubbish! That data is used for looking at visitor trends IN GENERAL, to figure out what problems the site or campaign may have to make them better. This results in a better site UI so that people can find what they're looking for quickly and easily, as well as a better all around experience for the visitor (and MAYBE even lower prices). The data can be analysed for a product page, for example, to see how many people are browsing it and following through to purchase, and how many people are leaving. This could be an indication of the product's popularity vs the purchase ratio which could signify that the price needs to be lowered or that there is a UI problem with checkout.
I don't know about you, but I purposefully leave my cookies turned on because I believe that in general they IMPROVE the web, not worsen it. There are ALWAYS going to be people trying to exploit everything technological, but they are the rare not the norm. By the same logic most of you are following, we should get rid of computers in general because people are using them for identity theft, fraud, and exploitation in general. Does that make sense?!
Makes me mad when I see the posts by paranoid masses that follow this line of logic because it's just not well thought out. And I really don't like stupid people.
I've always wondered if the most frequent customer is Jenny* for the stores that have this policy.
* 867-5309 for the 80's impaired.
...marketers lose their cookies
or
users toss their cookies.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Sounds like an ill-trained cashier. They know they're not going to get 100% compliance, so "no" is usually a fine answer. I can't imagine why a minimum-wage clerk would be so persistent unless they were explicitly told that it was necessary.
You'd have done the store a favor to mention this to the manager. If one clerk was misinformed they might all be. Customer tracking info isn't nearly enough to risk losing a sale. Ask once and take "no" for an answer.
It's actually quite a widespread thing. I forget where I initially heard it, but nowdays when I suggest it to people, they agree and understand why without me having to explain it, more often than not. :)
:D
If you go to any kind of internet gathering, get everybody there to swap theirs around. Get them to do it at other long distance gatherings. If anybody's watching the data, it will appear that people are moving across the country way more than normal. Completely shoots their data mining to hell too, if you can get enough people involved. So spread the word.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You seem to be saying that
I feel sure I speak for a great many slashdotters when I say "You WHAT?"
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Slightly different tack than "867-5309" but I always used to give 303-722-2713. At least in the 80s, that was a Denver, CO Dial-a-prayer line.
Alternately, for a really good time, call 303-499-7111.
I worked at Toys R Us about 5 years ago, and we had to type in a phone # before we could even start scanning items at the register.
It was fine - we simply entered the store phone number or 555-555-5555 when someone said "no" (or if they had 3 screaming kids, etc.). Then some manager noticed how often this was happening, and cracked down on the cashiers - "We MUST have a phone number!" At this point, most cashiers began simply entering their home phones instead.
I still think it's a stupid policy in general - they're trying to put you on a mailing list by reverse-matching your phone number to an address. Thankfully, my husband and I have cell-phones and no landline, so we tell that to any cashier who asks. I think I've only had one place ask again for the number once I've told them that.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
I have a firewall (it is a bit complicated, there is a machine that does NAT and then there is my machine) that blocks everything that goes OUT of my machine beside selected applications. I also user Opera with disabled ActiveX (no flash then) and I have "Clear chookies on exit enabled".
Only when I go to cnn.com there is a popup from the firewall telling me that some of core windows component wants to talk to DNS, I wonder what they are doing, why just CNN and not all the other web sites, there must be something oing on but windows does not tell me what is happening.
Really, if someone wants "persistence" then have them login and store all useful information on the server, cookies should be deleted every time the browser is closed and NO profile of user should be done in any way.
Maybe if advertisers would stop setting ridiculous expiration dates. The thought that advertisers think they can have a small peice of my hard drive until 2069 sickens me.
Mozilla (and firefox) makes it easy, set network.cookie.lifetimePolicy to 3 and then set network.cookie.lifetime.days to the maximum number of days a cookie can stay.
I have mine set to 2, if I visit a site and don't come back within 2 days, I think it's safe I won't miss anything by having them remember me.
Where did advertising come into this? I wasn't speaking about ads at all. We're talking about cookies here, not adblocking.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Ok, lets see... Persistent Identification Element, this is just flash cookies right? But how do we foil "Visitor Determination Methodology" We need a how to.
...can be potentially hazardous. When dealing with marketing folks you have to realise that, by nature, they are parasitic and selfish. In fact they are quite similar to lawyers (there are also far too many of them in the world than is needed). Marketers get caught up in the pursuit of "great Key Performance Indicators" and tend to lose sight (or never even cared about) offending the targets of their activities. The link to the (old and stale) Globe and Mail in this /. article is indicitave of that--the developers of the "new and improved" Flash-based session tracker talked about silently pushing more files onto surfers' machines, restoring their cookies without asking and making tracking files harder to find and remove as is it was a GOOD thing. It sounds like malware that spybot or anti-virus software should obliterate if you ask me!
Please to not be offended if marketing is your profession--there are a few out there that earnestly do try to improve peoples' lives through their trade (just like those in law). The above is a comment on the industry in general.
In any case since you seem to be more of a tech type than a marketer I wanted to comment on the technical aspects of your post in adition to making some philisophical opinions. A lot of what you were trying to perform could be done using a session variable passed through CGI (hidden input tags), or by using the "referrer" field in the HTTP header. You do not need to issue cookies or maintain states between multiple browsing sessions at all to track users anonymously for the purposes of analysing traffic and navigation pattterns on your site. Yes, you could still do "evil things" with these methods but at least it is limited to the one session and it doesn't intrude on a person's PC by writing persistent files to it that can be used for even more evil things.
Also, if aggregate data is all you need, you do not need to establish a persistent session cookie either. You can get ALL the info in your examples WITHOUT cookies at all if you are truly only interested in aggregate data. You also make the argument that sure, with a bit of effort we COULD link cookie-sessions long term but you don't need to because "user 5233258" is just as useful as "John Smith". Why do you even need "user 5233258" or even "123.231.132.111" anyways?
If you ever find yourself working on a project for marketing people you might want to try proposing a design that uses cookie-less methods (free of presistent data) to gather this sort of data. If one of them is savvy enough to notice you aren't using cookies anf that you should do so, or someone asks somehting along the lines of "can we keep sessions between visits" then ask a lot of "why" questions back. If you get a lot of push-back and weasel excuses it means they want to track personal data of customers. If they deny they'd ever want to do so after such talk they are LYING--they might not do it now or have specific plans to do so but I guarantee they are thinking that if they fill a bunch of database tables with it now they can link them together and make money off the info if they ever need to in the future.
If you still get static, present the argument that cookies are anow almost useless to collect information for a single visitor to a site over time. Many people disable cookies. The flash alternative is dead already with the Mozilla plug-in to kill it. Even MSIE 7 will have stricter default security settings that will limit cookies' tracking abilities. The GNOME Epiphany browser is also coming out with a feature that could catch on with more well-known browsers: An easy-to-set "privacy mode" that automatically scrubs all cookies, history and cache and any other traceable items every time you close the browser. You could even permanently make it the default mode if you wanted. So much for cookies being any more effective than CGI session variables!
I don't think marketing products in and of itself is evil, just that the industry doing it nowadays is.
I used to think this too.
Then they started sending me 10% off coupons for crap I *WANT*.
Hey that is kind of cool!
Email they do not get. I know EXACTLY what they are doing with that, and no I do not want them selling it to someone else I could care less about.
'I do not have email, sorry'.
I use cookies for session management and tracking usage in a site.
Spyware abuse generally occurs when a big company (doubleclick, valueclick, etc) want to track your usage between sites. The spyware fears generally arise with third party cookies.
These cookies generally come attached to images. For example the image ad on top of this slashdot page might access cookies that get used to build a profile of my slashdot usage.
Preventing spyware is a matter of blocking third party cookies.
Personally, I can't see any real reason why images (the IMG tag) should be allowed to set cookies.
When the main page sets a cookie, it is almost always to provide service to the end user. When an image sets a cookie, it is almost always so marketers can build profiles. My ideal browser would not allow third party cookies nor would it allow cookies to be set by img tags.
"But I will absolutely not abide you treating me as a "profile" and charging me more than you have to because you think you can get away with it based on what you know about me. That's just exploiting your data collection and trying to screw me over. No thanks."
Nvidia professional cards.
Nvidia bargain cards.
---
Name-brand groceries.
Generic groceries.
---
Tap-water
Bottled water.
I have often wondered why there isn't a push for browsers to support real grown up session tracking that is properly user configurable. Session tracking is something that has to be done so frequently I'm amazed someone has come up with a better solution.
At it's simplest session tracking could be implimented as a cookie that contains a fragment of XML (or maybe just formatted text if you're alergic to XML) which gives various pieces of information identifying the site.
To ensure that it's all above board make sure that the session identifier is digitally signed. By default the browser would be set to accept session requests (as happens now) but could query a repository of "abusers" and block certain sessions (much like email black lists only more effective because it's digitially signed).
Since this system only does one little thing it should be easy to implement and you could probably turn off other cookies.
Anyway just thought you might like to kick that idea about a bit and see how it fits.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I don't have a problem with the store clerk monitoring what brands I check out, spend time at; what isle's I spend most of my time in. The reason that I don't care is because I can check out the store clerk, find out what he's doing, where he's spending his time, when he's watching me.
Not so with web admins. Don't know what they're doing, where they're looking, when they're watching. The argument isn't "Why do you, the user, not want them, the admins, to know this stuff [through cookies]?" It's "Why do they have a right to obtain that information from me? Why should they have that priviledge?" When its something to do with me, assuming they have the right and then asking why I don't want that is nonsense. I have the right to tell them I don't want them monitoring me, they need to provide me with an adequate reason and option for why they deserve that info.
I don't care if its going to make my browsing experience better, they can collect that from those who don't care about their privacy.
Sure its nit picking now, but it can only get worse as corporations seek more control...and this is one of the ways they do it.
I don't see any reason to even allow them that liberty, since that liberty won't directly benefit me in a way I care about and it can only, from my perspective, become a control mechanism.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/04/17 7238
Most likely what you should be looking for is a feature not to disable cookies entirely, but only to allow
a) session-duration cookies ONLY, or
b) cookies associated with websites that don't collect personal information.
You need to re-read what I said. Your a) is basically exactly what I do. All persistent cookies become session cookies unless I whitelist your site.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Why not give them the goatse.cx guy's phone number? It would be much more pleasing knowing soon their computer is going to be filled with "interesting" pictures.
Cashier: May I have your phone number?
I don't HAVE a phone, you incensitive clod.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There's one other way, but I doubt most will immediately think of it.*
*Here's a book for those who like this kind of thinking. Blink: The power of thinking without thinking.
I'm not sure about now, but it used to be that phone numbers with the prefix of 976 were generally pay sex lines, at least here in Atlanta. So I give them 404-976-(whatever nasty four letter word I feel like at the time).
SYS 64738
That's the combination to my luggage!
Of course, nowadays both stores were probably owned by a parent mega-corp of a different name...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I don't mind when they ask for my zip code. Using a credit card will require that sometimes. However, the last time I went to them for some gear (and it will be the *last* time), they asked me for:
-Zip
-Phone number
-If I wanted a free fucking magazine subscription
-something else
I don't know what the last thing was because at that point I dropped the shit on the counter and walked out the door.
Never again will I return there.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Where is it now? Unless you drive a big rig, you probably don't have one. This may happen to the Internet.
Internet usage may already have peaked. AOL peaked a while back, having finally run out of suckers. A few reports indicate that overall time online has peaked. It's hard to tell; broadband "online time" reports often include idle computers.
The combination of viruses, worms, spam, popups, scams, and ads hardly makes it worth it any more.
There's a reason Toys R Us is perilously close to bankruptcy. Annoying their customers has got to be part of it.
they need a good dose of stfu!
I don't want cookies on my pc that let people know things about my web browsing habits, not because I have something to hide, and not because I think of it as 'spywarez', but simply because I do not agree with the tactics used by marketing research agencies, such as the ones these poor whiney capitalistic-minded cut-throat sharks represent.
Advertisers shove stuff in your face all over TV, billboards, bus stops, movie previews, and now the internet.
The 'Premium Content' internet advertising business model is a little bit more of a friendly approach to advertising, from a users perspective, but from a marketing perspective, being friendly (or considering the views of the consumer) isn't an option worth considering, to them.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Cookies are not, in and of themselves, evil. Or, at least, that isn't the way the cookie began life on the web. But having cookies enabled also invites spyware -- every time I leave cookies on in my browser for a couple of hours, I can scan/find/delete at least half a dozen cookies that are identified as spyware. And some of that is downright malicious.
If website builders and/or administrators insist on spreading spyware for fun and profit, then I say "fsck 'em all!"
While it might definitely be worthwhile to tell if people are coming BACK to your site, it would also be very valuable to look at individual sessions, and devise some more generalized conclusions from that. If you see a lot of sesions where the home page and maybe one other page are accessed (with no purchase), it's a sure bet you've got a problem. On the other hand, it would seem that if you have someone who navigates quickly to the catalog, selects and purchases an item, it could very well be a repeat customer.
I'm not sure that long-term data is that important (that require persistent cookies or other explicit ways of identifying individual users)...there seems to be a lot you can understand just by looking at what transpired during each session.
Java Session Beans use cookies. It drops one value. 'JSESSIONID'. That is then used to identify the session bean stored in memory on the server.
All this work that you did to avoid storing data in a cookie worked because the java session automatically set a cookie for you, and tried to enforce best practices.
eg.
1. cookie only stored session identifier
2. cookie is not persisitent and disappears on exit
Why do you have your friend's ex-wife's number? Or maybe that's why she's his ex-wife.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Annoying their customers has got to be part of it.
Wal-Mart is the main reason, though.
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Does anyone actually do this? Who was the survey for?
Found it on the bathroom wall. It's common knowledge in these parts.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I tried to look up this new tracking system from United Virtualities but couldn't find much about it. This site says that it is "tied to the browser" which makes me hopeful that this will only affect IE users, but does anybody know any more about it?
is it really worth wasting your time to prove a point? i would rather waste _their_ time by providing a fake telephone number or zip code. it's not like the kid behind the register is gonna recognize the phone number and zip code of the White House.
Yes, this is what they were laughing about!
And stop being a simpering government-needs-to-help-me whiner. Spam shows up because spammers can guess your email address, but cookies only arrive when your browser asks for them. The nice friendly web page says "Hey, kid, wanna cookie?" and you're supposed to say nothing, like your momma told you, not answer "Oooooohhhh, cookies!".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Their concerns aren't my concerns. If their business model has some holes in it, it isn't my job to help plug 'em. I don't give a shit about their "worries", nor am I obligated in any way, shape or form to help them on the road to profit.
My computer is my own. If I say you can't install a cookie on my browser then you don't get to install a cookie on my browser. It doesn't matter WHAT the cookie does; the only thing that matters is that I've said "it's my property, and I'm tell you to fuck off. So fuck off already." The fact that you may not like that *doesn't matter for shit*.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
It wouldn't be so bad.
In theory, having cookies to track where you go and what you do is a good thing. It allows marketers to target ads at you for stuff you are actually interested in. If they actually did that.
Unfortunately, they don't. They use it to bombard you with constant, endless ads for "related stuff", to the point where you can't actually see the content on the web page you want to read.
Or they decide that looking at Corvette pictures means you think your penis is too small, and therefore "natural male enhancement" is a "related product."
To hell with 'em all.
If you fit a particular profile, they might use cookies to make custom recommendations or deliver targeted advertising, but not much else.
Oh no! Slightly more relevant ads! I might actually see an ad for something I want!
Someone will bring up the idea that they might match your personal info to browsing habits, to which I can only say: If you were dumb enough to give you real name to Doubleclick or some other pervasive advertiser, you're boned. Good luck.
For the rest of us, cookies allow reasonably secure login and saved preferences over an indefinite time period. If you're too worried that double click cares about how much pr0n you personally, not as part of a demographic, look at, then turn off cookies. Personally, I don't see how my erratic behavior on the few sites that I trust with personal information can lead to anything bad.
That's one of my pet peeves. Best Buy is good for that. Radio Shack used to do that. Makes me a very angry customer - who finds some other place to buy what I want.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Alright, fine. Some types of cookies can be easily exploited, but there is one type of cookie that you DON'T want to turn off (and don't want people in general to turn off), and that is the session cookie.
All this 'anti cookie' propaganda is really getting out of hand. Session cookies are a great way to securely identify a series of otherwise unrelated requests as belonging to the same session. By turning off cookies one is also disabling this very valuable feature.
"But it doesn't matter" you say, because web sites can use URL rewriting instead. Well, think about it:
* If URL rewriting is used, exactly how is this better, from a privacy stand-point, than a session cookie? The exact same information is propagated, so nothing is gained in terms of privacy. In addition, the "evil" people whom everybody is presumably trying to prevent from tracking a user's session can also use this technique.
* On the issue of security and technical convenience however, you are making it worse. URL rewriting is inherently less secure in the fact of 'accidents' such as paste:ing a link (which the average joe won't understand contains sensitive information) to a work collegue sitting behind the same NAT:ing gateway. And how about referrer URL:s making it into web server logs? (There is no guarantee that the session identifier is encoded such that a security conscious browser can spot it, and refrain from sending it as part of a referrer URL to another web server.)
Overall, session cookies are vastly superior to URL rewriting in a number of different situations. But this overzealous anti-cookie paranoia is forcing people to use URL rewriting *anyway*. In tryng to increase privacy, it has actually been lessend - along with security!
Just to give one example of how the ACP (anti cookie paranoia) can interact with web pages: I was recently involved in a situation where some browsers would disable cookies (even session cookies) for requests that were made as part of an IFRAME on a page hosted on another domain (presumably for privacy concerns). This resulted in, for practical purposes, a total inability to use cookies on that site. URL rewriting is now used instead, to a detriment of security and privacy.
/ Peter Schuller
--
peter.schuller@infidyne.com
http://www.scode.org
And now I somehow have an insatiable desire to rip into a 1 pound box of Nilla wafers.
I don't worry about cookies. Almost 100% of the sites I visit use them to indicate which forum posts I have read or to identify myself so I don't have to repeatedly provide my credentials.
I've been surfing the net since 1994 and have not had my identity stolen or seen adverse affects due to accepting cookies. Those who worry so much about cookies are wearing tin foil hats. If you are so worried about cookies use an anomymozing service. Myself, I'll let the cookies continue to help my surfing experience and leave the tin foil hats to the nervous virgins.
If you are visiting porn sites and are worried about your privacy, well by all means block cookies. But when you visit legitimate sites you visits on a daily basis accept the cookies that are designed to help you. I use a different browser for those Pr0n sites and I do block cookies on those. For the sites I visit daily, I use my normal browser and accept cookies.
I should clarify the example at the end: I am absolutely not saying that cookies should cross domain borders; the set of cookies for the 'parent site' and the 'child site' would remain orthogonal - but not *DISABLED*.
/ Peter Schuller
--
peter.schuller@infidyne.com
http://www.scode.org
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why delete them. I don't accept them except for 6 different sites. Works for me.
What annoys me is the number of people who collect cookies for no good reason at all, specifically Apache users who collect an "Apache" cookie because that seems to be the default behaviour and they're too lazy to turn it off. And many of them are the same sorts of people who bitch about the privacy invasion from all these cookies.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Cookies don't track which sites you go to.
l
What world are you living in? Did you read...
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/eff_privacy_top_12.htm
"However, some companies that manage online banner advertising are, in essence, cookie sharing rings. They can track which pages you load, which ads you click on, etc., and share this information with all of their client Web sites (who may number in the hundreds, even thousands.) Some examples of these cookie sharing rings are DoubleClick, AdCast and LinkExchange. For a demonstration of how they work, see: http://privacy.net/track/"
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
You are taking out your annoyance on someone who has: a) No real interest whatsoever in whether or not you buy X piece of crap (unless they get commissions on sales) and b) No control over the policy, the system, and in most cases, the cash register either. They might be able to get around it (as the clerk did in the OP's post), but that's not the point
The point I'm making here is this: don't get pissed at some clerk or manager at a chain store for following store policy, or expect them to change it for you, even if it's a dumb policy.
I've worked at department stores and grocery stores, etc - it sucks. And you know what? The only people I ever really disliked when I worked any retail job were the people who thought it was MY store and MY decision to harass them for a phone number/address, whatever. These are the people that expect you to break the rules for them (c'mon, you can just give me the discount, I forgot my coupons), then treat you like shit when you follow the rules of the company that puts the paycheck in your hand at the end of the week.
It was store policy to ask for a phone number, the register prompted for it, and we're supposed to ask. If we got shopped by a "secret shopper" or a manager caught us ignoring it, that's our ass, not the customer's. On behalf of all past, present and future retail employees: We don't care what your personal information is. We care about our paycheck and about following the rules of the job.
I agree that it should only take one polite refusal to avoid having to give out your information. Just keep in mind that the manager may have to give approval, and in the larger chains, even the manager may not have the power to negate store policy. Either way, the bottom line is even if the manager has the ability to counteract the policy, they don't care. The manager at Best Buy is not sitting at home in a deep depression because you bought your printer at Circuit City instead.
The only time they can get this information is if a third party has an Ad, or some other content on both sites (which is what makes cookies from ad sites more dangerous).
And I don't know which sites do this. Nor do I want to worry about it, nor do I want to worry about leaking a single bit of information. I want to be as close to an anonymous ghost browsing past everything as I can.
You know why customers don't like cookies? Because cookies take away a certain amount of their privacy. This has some value, both to the customer, and to the advertiser.
Now, sometimes a vendor can make a very fair, clear offer, where I know exactly what I'm giving away. The best example I can think of is grocery stores. They give me a discount that's probably about 5% on average, depending upon what I buy, and I give them a complete log of everything I buy. Each time I give them information, it is voluntary -- if I choose to buy something with cash and not use my store card on a given purchase, I have that ability.
Many people find that their personal information is worth more to the vendor than it is to them, and so sell it.
On the other hand, when I turn on cookies, I have *no idea* what information websites are able to compile. There's always a new, clever trick to take advantage of some new, ill-advised system that browser developers have added. Once upon a time, it was associating email addresses with cookies by having links to FTP sites for images and using the tendency of browsers (once benign and safe) to provide the user's email address as a password. Yesterday it was ad banners being used to combine multiple sources of identity accross sites. Who knows what it will be tomorrow? Why should I worry about it, when I can just turn off cookies, except for a whitelist?
Plus, once information is leaked, it's leaked forever; information wants to be free. Once Doubleclick can associate my Slashdot ID with my Freshmeat ID, they can associate my Freshmeat ID with my Democratic Underground ID, which they can associate with my UnderageLesbianGoatPorn.Com ID. And all those associations are going to stick with me for a lifetime in some database. Maybe it'll come to haunt me, maybe it won't. It'd sure be valuable to a political opponent if I decide to run for the Senate in twenty years. What about knowing that I'm the same guy that is constantly Googling for AIDs information? A health insurer would definitely like to have a potential red flag on me ahead of time; that's valuable information.
So, yes, cookies can be useful. But they represent a deal being made between the browser user and the website producer in which the browser user has no idea what exactly they are giving up. There have been some attempts to remedy this (such as via P3P), but nothing really dealt with it.
When it comes down to it, I don't really care whether it's easier or not for a website producer to require cookies. I don't care whether they can only make an IE-compatible site, either; I'll just go to a different site that can meet my requirements more.
Spyware wiping tools for Windows may not be a great solution, but they represent a huge backlash -- people are tired of computers representing some huge, complex black box that can be influenced by a vast number of people intent on siphoning away their privacy. Those people are getting quite irritated now. Privacy policies are not the answer -- I can't read the privacy policy of every website I go to, nor can I reasonably verify that the website is following the policy, and in any event, most have a clause stating that the policy may change at any time without warning. There's only one way that I can ensure that you aren't invading my privacy, and that's to make it damn hard for you to even get the information necessary to do so.
I'm fairly generous. I *do* allow cookies, but only on a per-session basis. Given the increasing amount of demand people have for no-cookies sites, I'm hoping that I can move to a whitelist-based system without too much pain soon.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
In an ideal world, employees would discover what policies are blatently offencive to customers and rather than deal with a bad situation they would leave.
But unfortunatly no one needs morality when there isn't enough to eat.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Of course, nowadays both stores were probably owned by a parent mega-corp of a different name...
And if non-invasive company makes more money than invasive company, said mega-corp has some interesting data to play with.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The pattern is that people spend (a lot of) money on products sold through phone calls, TV commercials, pop-ups, Flash, cookies, spam, etc.
Marketers wouldn't spend money on those things if they didn't bring in enough sales to make them worthwhile.
Just look at the web log. Saw a processing tool (http://polliwog.sourceforge.net/ that will let you see what a visitor has been looking at. With or without cookies. Doesn't track you on subsequent visits though, so slightly less evil.
I know where to get the things I need (food, medicine, etc.). If I decide that buying something that is unnecessary (fun), I can find it on my own. How do I do it? The large and mysterious world known as the Internet provides all that I need. If I want a game, I'll look on a gaming site. If I want to buy a gift for someone I can look on Amazon or eBay. If I want music, I can look on iTunes (or use some other site, or even go to an actual store).
I do not need to know that I can win a free iPod if I shoot a duck. I do not need to know that I can win a PSP by shooting one. I do not need to know how to increase my erectile quality. I do not need to know how to lose weight with a magic super-pill. I do not need to know that I can increase my height with a pill (instantaneously too, the guy was wearing the same clothes the whole time and seemed to stretch more than grow).
I'm sure there are honest people out there, but they are basically needles in a pile of flashing popups informing me that my computer may be infected with spyware. Some of you may like a product you see on the internet, or would like to encourage honest marketers to continue advertising on the internet, but the rest of us who despise advertising should be free to do what we can to prevent them from making us see their ad. If it means disabling 3rd party cookies, thus creating skewed results for marketers, then so much the better. We aren't going to buy the product, no matter how much they beg. If it's a really good deal, I'll hear about it on a message board (for those of you who dislike it when people use absolutes without considering all possibilities).
Like it or not, the cashier represents the store during the sale. During my experience at the store, I probably have the most "face time" with the cashier, and checking out ends up being the part of the sale that tends to stick in my mind. I want it to be pleasant and hassle free.
Asking for personal information will get you a polite but terse "no." I have no intention of justifying my response to you or anyone else. Pressing the matter restults in me getting annoyed. Pressing *again* puts you in risk of losing the sale, and yes, I'm going to tell the manager why. I recognize that the cashier doesn't set the store policy. I don't think I've ever yelled at a cashier for that very reason. However, unless the store management hears about the cheesed customers and the lost sales, the store policy won't change.
I vote with my wallet and my feet. Yelling and screaming just gets you written-off as a whackjob. Telling the manager why you're taking your business elsewhere, and then doing so, punishes the crummy vendor and rewards the competitor who doesn't have the crappy policy.
Yep, the only reason I know where zip 12345 is ... filling out online registration forms. You can usually put whatever crap into the address fields, but most folks have gotten smart enough to cross-check the city, state, zip combo before accepting the form.
EPIC has a page on "Flash Cookies" online at http://epic.org/privacy/cookies/flash.html
It argues that the direct marketing company is overstating the capabilities of the Flash Cookie.
cookie no lose effectiveness! cookie always give cookie monster good buzz.
TWO things i am sick to my stomch over is everytime i want to buy something and go up there they:
1: ask for my phone number
2: would like to try xxx magazine today etc etc..
i am like NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
Unfortunately, that has the same problem as I was discussing in my original post - the store manager doesn't care either, in most cases. The store manager in a major chain gets paid a few dollars more an hour than the cashier, has a lot more rules and some more resonsibilities, maybe even a set of 'manager keys'.
What he STILL doesn't have, is a stake in the business. If you leave and go elsewhere to make a purchase, so what? Yeah, it loses the store money, but as a store/shift/dept manager, he'll still get paid, and the odds are extremely slim that it will affect him in any meaningful way.
I'm not saying it's totally pointless, but don't kid yourself into thinking you're putting the hurt on the store and they're going to feel bad about it.
Retail Employees don't even enter into the equation. You are educated by the corporation, instructed by the corporation, and acting as an agent thereof. When you have a conversation with a customer, you are basically a proxy for the company.
People who behave like the grandparent poster are doing society a service. Losing sales (or public protest! as if!) is the only message that we, as individuals, can send back to the company after hearing a trained-parrot spiel on company policy. In great enough numbers, people can reward the good companies and punish the bad ones. I'll state this again from the opposite direction: don't mistake the store manager for someone who can affect change. If they even ask for your phone number, you have every right in the world to walk away. Don't trouble a manager over it, because you're not helping anyone.
It seems like not enough people today understand their rights and responsibilities in a capitalist society. That's why we have so many of the deplorable, sheepish kind of consumer and too few empowered ones. If capitalism is going to work for us, just like democracy, people have to care enough to vote.
Jasin NataelTrue science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
I hear ya. And no, I don't expect anyone from the store (especially the bigger ones) to come pleading for me to bring my business back. However a lot of retailers realize that folks are better connected nowadays, and the internet can be as much a liability to them as an asset. If it's easy for people to rate stores' performance (as many websites like epinions et al do) then folks may actually get steered away from the crappy shopping experiences. Of course, folks are fundamentally cheap, so I fully expect a good sale to bring them right back in. Most "consumers" have a shorter memory than my 13-year-old cat.
Unfortunately, this "we need your personal information" behavior is symptomatic of a larger problem. Children at an early age are taught to obey people in authority. The "you must obey or else" threat is continued up until college. The teaching isn't really well bounded, so folks end up blindly obeying anyone who portrays himself as being an "authority figure." When retailers start this crap, I can't help but wonder why people put up with it, but they do. We're raising our children to be consumer sheep.
Not good enough. That's the problem right there and why they will lose sales, and the deserve to with that attitude. So we should just hand over our money and be happy with shit service? No way...
In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
What? and do you think that we ever will? If you are serving a customer, you are the face of the company at that moment to them. If you don't care enough about customers, why should they care about your paycheck?
The manager at Best Buy is not sitting at home in a deep depression because you bought your printer at Circuit City instead
But he should pass it up the line that it's costing sales. Don't forget that customers owe stores nothing. Stores should have to work to get sales, that's what capitalism is all about. And if an item costs ($x + personal information) and people view that as too much to pay they'll lose sales.
Well, I went to the stores' web site and left there a message that I will never buy from their store again and for the e-mail address I left 'nospam@anywhere.com'. Don't know whether they changed the policy (yeah, right!) but I pass the store often - I just don't enter it.
and never a 'right' of websites. If they want to 'remember' my order, they can ask me, and I can accept the cookie. If they want to place a counter, beacon, or some other BS on my computer, they can expect to be denied.
This is basic Solicited versus UNSolicited marketing.
Once a year, one person will ring my doorbell trying to sell something. There's a reason that only _ONE_ person is marketing that way - because it doesn't work. If I don't know who is ringing my doorbell, I don't answer the door.
My computer/(aka most trusted personal information appliance) will get the same respect, because it's an extension of me and my persona.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Even if cookies cured cancer and promoted world peace and got me dates with Claudia Schiffer, I would still delete them, because they are data on my hard drive which I did not give explicit permission to to exist. I will remember my own log-ins, thank you. It's none of anybody's business what my buying/surfing habits are. And Bash shell scripts/cron jobs will continue to kill cookies in every folder they accumulate in, no matter what devious tricks Madison Avenue comes up with.
Would you buy a car just to let somebody else drive it? And you notice that it's *marketers*, not consumers wringing their hands over cookies. That should clue you right there.
You knew this was bogus even as you typed it, didn't you?
The purpose of applying heat to salesdrones is to supply them with a negative feedback loop between myself and their employer. When they get tired of taking flack from customers for *doing their job* they'll either complain about that particular duty to the boss (hiding his cowardly ass behind closed doors where I can't question his stupid policy directly), or will quit, costing the boss a cost of replacing and retraining the employee, as well as causing the employee to be motivated to work a real job where their duties don't require them to harass the public.
Wahhhhh-h-h, give me a bunch of guff about how Mr. and Mrs. Salesdrone need to eat, etc. I eat plenty, so do my family, and I never worked behind a register a day in my life. Or telemarketing, or drug dealing, or terrorism, or putting cookies on people's computers, or working for Bill Gates, or manning the showers at Aushwitz (sp?), or any of the other activities somebody else can hire you to do which are detrimental to the public. Is it your job to make other people's lives hell? Tell your boss you refuse to do that. If you lose that job, consider it a blessing. If it happens enough times with enough people, watch Holy "store policy" change!
But if we all continue acting like spineless worms, we quite rightly deserve to be powerless to do anything about the various hells of modern society except snivel about it to the thin air on Slashdot. I do something about it. Salesdrones, "customer service representatives", "telecommunications-enabled consumer assitance technicians" or any other bogus thing they're called get the full heat of my wrath, as if they, personally set the policy themselves. And if my job makes me do something I morally disagree with, I circumvent the rule, campaign to get it changed, or quit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scruples
[Begin humor--!- PS I hope I've offended you and ruined your day! Because I didn't decide to type this post. I work for a homeless guy who lives in a dumpster in LA, who paid me a dime back in 1986 and said, "Go bug somebody else!" I am committed to carrying out my Mission Statement, and it is not my fault what consequences of that action transpire because I'm only following company policy. -!--End humor]
and just up and quitting? even if you'd hadn't told us that you've never worked behind a register, that right there, would have made it clear. nobody works these kinds of jobs because of the great satisfaction they get from handling vast amounts of other people's money all day. those of us who work the service industry are working it because it was the job we could find in the place where we lived at the time that we needed a job. i'm temping for a fulfillment agency right now, taking incoming service calls. it's a crappy job, and there are plenty of policies that i don't agree with. but i will be canned if i don't follow them, and this was not the first place that i applied to, so it's not like i can just up and go somewhere else.
i think also you've failed to take into account what getting fired means for people who work service jobs like these. you get fired from Sears, so you go and apply at Kohl's:
maybe i'm stupid or naive, but i don't think they're gonna be calling you back.
and finally, the most important thing that you've failed to take into account is that We Don't Care. at all. service reps don't like customers, but we also don't hate customers. we just absolutely honestly do not give a goddamn about customers. we don't know about your problem until you tell us, and while you are explaining your problem to us, we care about it only in that it stands between us and the paperclip sculptures we've been building all morning. most of the time we will process your form, handle your refund, and make you as happy as we can, as efficiently as we can, all by our lonesome and without any whining and blustering. on the contrary, berating us as though the problem that we have only just now been informed of is our fault, has this odd tendency to cause typos to appear on the addressing labels for refund checks, and to create rebate form wormholes.
you made some decent enough points, but you kind of also missed the point: yelling at someone when you know it's not their fault, is uncalled for, and further, it's actually a bad idea, if their job is to keep you happy: it could encourage them to stop doing their job.
i am a loser geek, crazy with an evil streak, yes i do believe there is a violent thing inside of me.
Is there a giant 'cookie jar' out there, where I can send the cookies that I no longer want or need (but don't mind if someone else has); and in return maybe I can take a few cookies that someone else has turned in, play about with, and find what they do ?
With regards to the discussion, I couldn't care less about Marketers, but saying cookies are bad because of companies like doubleclick, is like saying images are bad, because of animated gifs. Cookies have lots of really useful applications, when you want to persistant states with out requiring regristration (which I hate).
It used to be that sites were not really customizable. Those that were, were like what netscape.com is right now, and any change required page reloads and were generally undesirable. With the advancement of a standard DOM (pretty much everyone supports level 1), you can now do lot's of really cool stuff - allowing users to change things around at light speed, making it practical and not just a bloated nuciance. The JS/UIX term is a great example of this: http://www.masswerk.at/jsuix/
However, if you want to create something that last more than just one brower session, and works well on a per user basis (particularly for people on lan's), the only real way is to use cookies. Of course you don't store any more information in there than needed.
It doesnt matter, they just cut the locks off luggage..
i hate pansy republicans
Well, there's always Cookies Revenge
http://www.hirnbrauser.de/ac/cookiesrevenge.txt
The purpose of fdisk is to partition your disk. Yes, it could be destructive, but it is also necessary. You have to be able to partition the disk. There's no real way around it.
This guy is collecting data tracking every users movements through his site, just to get aggregate information. Did it not occur to him that most all of this aggregate information he wants to see could be obtained without making his system capable of tracking every unique individual through the system and websites he advertises on?
Probably not, no. He didn't consider the users privacy, because he likely doesn't think of those users as people deserving of their privacy. It probably never occurred to him to examine what could be done with the data collection system he built. He simply took the most straightforward approach and built something by which he could track every little damned thing. And then he complains that users erase their cookies, thus fucking up his privacy-invading tracking machine.
If he simply wanted to obtain aggregate usage data, he doesn't need to use unique-ID persistant cookies. There are other ways that are not nearly as objectionable.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I propose that all slashdot readers use the same fake password when asked in these polls. Eventually, maybe they will get it.
My password is always wizzzard (Three z's)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Oh, you poor naive fool...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
While I agree compleatly with the sentaments of both parent and grand parent, there are othe effective ways of getting around this. One it to memorize the address and phone number of someplace else. I recomend, for example, the local BBB. (I also know of people who like to route these calls to the local police office but I have ethical qualms about that) In any case filling a database with "junk" information makes the data incrementally less valuable, and therefroe decreases (far more then a NULL field) the disencentive to collect information.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
The TSA doesn't want you to lock your luggage any more. They need to rifle through your underpants.
cpeterso
In case you were wondering, "the gutter" is where I was born, the "mean streets" are where I was raised. I don't make my judgements on society from the window of my ivory tower, I'm doing it based on looking back on my own struggle. Everything I've ever gotten in my life, I fought for. If I were the kind of wuss who clung to one thing in life for security, living my whole life like a rat afraid to go out of his hole, I never would have survived very long. And I still kept to my scruples, my conscience, my morals, the entire time.
Yes, I'm talking to you. Quit and go on welfare. Better your position is unfilled, with nobody to carry out those orders; and when I pay taxes, this is the exact kind of use I dream of it being put to (this, and keeping the libraries around, are pretty much the only two Government programs that work). And you certainly deserve to take it easy, if you find your world so overwhealing. God forbid you'd have had to live any year of my life, you'd have blown your fucking brains out.
When I go to the gas station, the attendant does not put a tracking device on the car that keeps track of everything I look at in the store and allows him to take note of whether I stop off for gas with one of his competitors
Cookies doesn't work like that -- and many gas stations, supermarkets etc. actually do keep track of what you do in their store, that's part of the reason why they have member cards (and give discounts to members), i.e. it makes it possible for them to get a purchase history for their customers, even when the customers pay with cash.
But have they considered that I might not want to be forced to watch any ads at all?
Even for products that I am sometimes interested in, I'm not always looking to buy more. Last time I had a HD die on me, I was very interested in finding a replacement quickly, but that doesn't mean I'm happy to watch HD ads all the time.
From my point of view, good marketing is marketing that I can go and find when I want to, not that finds me when I don't.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
your reply is either a massive non sequitur, a failed attempt at derailing the discussion, or just an absolutely miserable argument. you state that you're casting judgements while looking back on your own life, rather than while looking down from some ivory tower, as though the two are mutually exclusive. further, you're throwing that out there like having been through it yourself is an acceptable excuse for making other people go through it. if you truly believe that, then you've made it out of the ghetto, but the ghetto hasn't worked it's way out of you. that's the exact same philosophy behind "my da' whupped me, boy, darned if i ain't gonna whup you." congratulations: you are successfully perpetuating the cycle.
further, you're totally fighting my battle for me with your next line or two, man. "Everything I've ever gotten in my life, I fought for." is this intended to suggest that toiling through rotten jobs at bad hours for miserable pay isn't fighting for what you get? if that's what you're saying, it's absurd, and if that's not what you're saying, you're gonna have to further explain it, then, 'cause i have no idea what that sentence has to do with what we were talking aboug. and though i don't quite see how your next sentence is relevant to the discussion either, whether or not clinging to one thing for security makes you a wuss, depends a lot on what's being clung to. or is "keeping to ones scruples the entire time" (lightly paraphrased) not the same as "clinging to one thing for security" ?
as a brief aside, i think it's ironic that your original post berated people for not sticking to their guns in the face of an overpowering force, but your follow up post implies that your success was achieved by being flexible at the appropriate moments...
as a curtesy, i will decline to comment on your welfar declaration, or your "mile in my shoes" closer; it's not worth the flame war.
i am a loser geek, crazy with an evil streak, yes i do believe there is a violent thing inside of me.
My way, my man, leads to change. The public can assert itself and refuse to be treated like lab rats doing tricks to earn their next pellet, or it can go on running the rat race. You, me, everybody: we all need to be free. And if freedom were all that easy, there'd be a lot more of it to go around.
My apologies for being offensive. I'm just pointing out, I do what I want these days. I work for me. I alter the rules to fit myself. I don't have millions of dollars, but I get by and provide for my family. And the attitude I have demonstrated, that's what got me here. You can try that path, or find your own.