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Net Marketers Worried as Cookies Lose Effectiveness

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

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."

3 of 556 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, yes it does. by Otto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Yes, yes it does. by Miros · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you dont trust the website, why would you ever give it personal information anyway? In the above poster's example, he said that they collected personal information about users when they would buy something (when else?). I'm sure that you're not suggesting that you buy things from websites that you dont trust.... SO, what are you saying exactly? You sound paranoid.

  2. Marketers have only themselves to blame by phillymjs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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