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Death of Cookies, Spyware Greatly Exaggerated?
securitas writes "The New York Times' Bob Tedeschi interviews several Internet marketing leaders who debate recent reports that Internet users are deleting cookies en masse and causing serious problems for advertisers. Among the interviewed is Eric Peterson, co-author of the Jupiter Research report that claims 39 percent of Internet users delete cookies. Slashdot has recently had stories about this supposed trend in June and July. A shorter version of the article at IHT. Who is telling the truth and who is deleting cookies? Are you?"
Here's a challenge for all the companies (and individuals) out there who think it's perfectly acceptable to track and profit from every personal detail you can get your hands on of the people who interact with you. I'll let you track and profit from everything I do if you let me track and profit from everything you do. Complete discloser in both direction. Anything less is unacceptable.
I think there is an even better solution. The only reason I have a problem with the whole cookies thing is that what is being taken from me has a commercial value. If the people collecting my preferences can sell them to larger companies or profit by them by tailoring product lines and advertising, then money is being exchanged for my opinion.
If money is being exchanged or made from my opinion then the one individual that most deverves some or all of that financial gain is the original owner of the opinion/preference (me). However, through the cookies scheme, I'm the only one not getting paid.
If I own something that has value and someone else takes it and prevents me from profitting myself from it, that is theft, plain and simple. I don't want someone else's prefences in exchange for mine. I want the monetary value of my opinion.
And how do you figure you "own" the information? You visit site X, doesn't the list of people who visit site X belong to site X? Do you "own" the fact that you drive to work every morning at 8am? Do you "own" the fact that I saw you walking your dog in front of my house this morning? Did the traffic reporter steal from you when he reported the congestion you were stuck in? Did the newscaster steal from you when he reprted the headcount of the "Million Moron March"?
You want to block cookies, fine. I'm sure you accept the consequences of your actions, no problems. The the concept that someone who is taking the effort to aggregate the behavior of millions is stealing from you personally is stupidity.
My other car is a Popemobile
Anyone just not give a damn? I mean, everyone's up in arms about privacy, and these lofty ideals of how it should be protected, etc. Just come out and say it. You don't want anyone else to see what porn sites you've been to.
Personally, I don't care about cookies. I don't have many illusions of privacy to begin with. I'm just non-egotistical enough to know that no one really cares about what sites I go to, as an individual.
They want to track my usage and habits? Fine. Throw me in a demographic, and call it a day. Use me as a statistic. Whatever.
Is everyone here paranoid, or do I have any fellow compatriots in the nation of apathy?
I agree whole heartedly. Cookies got a bad name in the late nineties and have never recovered from the uninformeds' position that they must be evil.
I also agree with the AC who said that the vast majority of 'average' users don't even know what cookies are, let alone block or delete them.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
i went through a no-cookies allowed period a couple of years ago and i quickly found something out: they're actually useful and in a lot of cases, dare i say it, desireable.
call me lazy but i actually like my login forms prefilled (name only, of course). i like my template preferences recorded. when i go to ecommerce site 'x' i honestly find it convenient to see what i bought on my last trip.
and, above all, i want to be able to maintain sessions on a lot of sites. increasintly, if you don't have cookies, holding a session is impossible (unique id's on the getline are going the way of the dodo) and, increasingly, sites want you to maintain sessions to do anything useful.
2 1337 4 u!
It must suck being only able to get 13 basic channels. What kind of antenna are you using?
Yes, this was said with tongue-in-cheek, but if you have any sort of digital cable (or cable television at all for that matter), they know exactly what you're watching, for how long, and what channels you switch to, and at what intervals.
Sure, they might not yet be able to tell when you get up and work on your motorcycle in the garage for 2 hours while the TV is on in the house, but soon enough they'll be able to do that too.
Here's a challenge for all the companies (and individuals) out there who think it's perfectly acceptable to track and profit from every personal detail you can get your hands on of the people who interact with you. I'll let you track and profit from everything I do if you let me track and profit from everything you do. Complete discloser in both direction. Anything less is unacceptable.
/....
As a Slashdot reader who routinely removes all cookies, I don't have a problem with people that delete cookies for whatever reason it is. I do, however, find it a tad bit troubling that you feel that people are tracking your every, personal move. With some spyware and other slightly less benevolent sites, this may be the case, but in most of the cases there are no direct links to you as an individual.
I should probably disclose the fact that I work in the marketing department of a very large ad agency, so in that sense I may be a bit biased. That said, habbit watching really is harmless to say the least, and usually useful, even when it has absolutely no ties to the name or identity of an individual.
You see, advertisers are NOT interested in pissing off the customer. Believe it or not, most advertisers would very much want to see happy customers, not pissed off ones. That's part of the entire reason why user habbits are recorded. Simply to gather trends, likes and dislikes, and hopefully provide products and services that better fit what the consumer wants, and removing what isn't wanted.
I don't pretend to believe that habbit tracking is a one-stop catch-all solution, or that there aren't annoying commercials, but the intent of such tracking and data gathering is explicitly to try and get people that are INTERESTED IN THE FIRST PLACE to get exposure to whatever they are selling, and NOT expose people that aren't. You see, one way or another, exposure to someone that isn't interested still costs the advertiser money, and may even lend to negative image reception. Not a good thing. What we would ALL like to see is ads we're interested in seeing, and none that we're not. The reason people are a bit pissed over ads is because it's something they don't want, and could care less about.
You do have the freedom to remove these cookies, mess with their content or whatever. You're not obligated to feed data. However, to say that all cookies and data collection is evil, is naive at best and most likely ignorant. Without such forms of tracking, be it on the web or in real retail outlet, you would likely end up with a bunch of stores that don't carry what you want, and have trouble finding services you're interested in.
Of course, these comments are probably not terribly appreciated on
The number of people who visit site $x belongs to site $x. Any identifying information about those people belongs to the individual people who visit the site.
The fact that you saw "someone" walking "a dog" in front of your house this morning is fairly innocuous. Be very careful, though, when you start identifying who, or whose dog.
A good body of privacy law will be based on the notion that any and all identifying information about me, belongs exclusively to me, and my not be used, published, stored or distributed without my express written consent. Nothing that falls short of that standard is adequate.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
However, through the cookies scheme, I'm the only one not getting paid.
Yes, you are getting paid. You get to use the website. Unless of course you'd like to pay for each time you click on a hyperlink?
Hosting a large website can be expensive, so I don't really object to SOME advertising / cookies. As long as the information is reasonably harmless to me, and the ads not too intrusive, I consider it fair.
"I want the monetary value of my opinion."
/. makes money from all the suckers who paid to read your post as well as the ads on the page whose impressions are generated by.. people reading your post.
Yet you post it to slashdot for all to see for free. Possibly you've even paid for the privilege.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!