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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."
Hrm? They track you through the cookies, yet comparisons to "spyware" are unjustified?
I think you make some really interesting points. From one aspect, you are tracking users by depositing information on their computer. While you claim this information could not be used to identify them elsewhere, it's certainly a concern with less careful web developers at the cookie helm. At the same time, you make an interesting point about how a store owner may want to track how their users use their site, what brings them there, and what they look for. If you think of a real store, the owner would certainly be able to do this easily by simply watching the customers (many do, many even ask if you want help to see what it is that you're looking for). Really, without some tracking mechanism like this, web shops would have to depend entirely on user feedback to determine how easily their customers are finding products on their sites, and how many visitors turn into buyers. I think both of these pieces of information can be quite critical to obtaining success.
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.
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
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 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? ]=-
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
But ultimatly, most users would probably enjoy the massive improvments in customer expierience that could be achieved using this information.
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.
Here's the problem: companies are impersonal. So are websites. No amount of "tracking" will make a website seem like a conversation with anohter person. If you want my opinion, ask for it. Either way, I will be deleting cookies from your website every day.
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.
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.
And how exactly did this happen. I have not deleted my cookies for a couple YEARS since I last reloaded my computers, and have yet to have a single problem with stolen passwords or any of these other problems that evil cookies are supposedly causing.
There is the possibility that a large enough group of companies collaborating could use the information to link purchases and browsing habits together. But I really don't care. They want to try to personalize my ads, that's fine too. Why? Because it's a free lunch. They think they're convincing me to buy stuff, when in fact I don't give a fuck. As long as the illusion is maintained, I'm happy to let them think they're learning valuable information about me. If this avenue is cut off to advertisers, either the free lunch will end or something more insidious will take its place.
Most companies only care about using cookies to keep track of visitors to their site anyway, and this can be useful to improve the site. A site that uses tracking information to see what other sites you visit (which is difficult without having their ads directly on other sites, which usually isn't the case because someone else usually hosts the images) and sells your email address is probably not one you want to continue purchasing from.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
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.
Get adblock, only allow cookies to be set by the originating website and use a hosts file that blocks most ad sites and then you won't have to worry about it.
Holy crap that's a lot of work. I simply changed my preferences to "delete cookies at shutdown" and then add sites I want to remember me on a site-by-site basis.
Far, far simpler. Far, far more effective. When I find a new site and decide I want them to remember me, I simply add that new site to the whitelist. No hosts file slowdown (and no need to maintain the hosts file), no need to change any settings which don't work in the long run (what if I visit originating website directly somehow?), no need to use an adblocker (not for that purpose anyway). It's simple, it's low maintainance, it's more effective. What isn't there to like? So it screws up some poorly designed website's privacy-invading user-tracking statistical analysis. Tough shit to them then.
- 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.
Cookies don't track which sites you go to. A cookie has a domain that it actually is assigned to. When you visit that domain, the web browser sends that cookie to the server. If I go to amazon.com and they put a cookie on my system, then the only people who can look at it is amazon.com.
Well, Sherlock, we're talking about the marketers like Doubleclick here. Doubleclick has banners on countless websites. Each banner's picture has the website it's displayed on encoded in the URL. Additionally, they set cookies from the domain doubleclick.net. Now what happens? Doubleclick can track you because each of their banners on all sites they have a banner on can read the cookie.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Cookies cannot be accessed by sites that did not put them there in the first place
You'd hope that would be true, but historically that has not been the case. A google for "cookie exploits", "cookie migration" and even a browse of IE "domain" bugs shows this to be true.
The carefulness of web developers has nothing to do with anything.
Really? Some years ago I noticed that the FriendsReunited.co.uk website set a cookie after I'd logged in, along the lines of "confirmeduser=23959".
What happened if I modified the cookie? Yep, you guessed it... ability to modify somebody elses details.
As a web developer, I know that cookies are a good solution to the problem of maintaining state in a stateless medium
If the medium is stateless there is no solution. You mean "as a lazy developer, cookies work most of the time"?
As a web developer
I'm guessing you claim cookies to be "good" because your development environment/web-server is not configured to allow anything else? Why not just append a "&sessionid=[big binary data]" to all your page links? I'm guessing that, despite being a "web developer" you are not given the ability to do so
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.