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?"

Comments

Yes

[It doesn't come easy]

[...]who is deleting cookies? Are you?

Routinely and automatically. I don't need any help in remembering my ID, password, or credit card number, thank you. And I don't want any company tracking my every move on the net just so they can turn around and sell information about my personal habits, whatever those habits may be.

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.

Re:Yes

[dajak]

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.

: The concept that someone who is taking the effort to aggregate the behavior of millions is stealing from you personally is stupidity.

It's just as nonsensical as the concept of advertisers losing money if people delete cookies. Or the concept of losing money on non-sales because of piracy. No money is changing hands, and no goods are stolen. Just business models that reach the end of their useful life.

I, for one, don't bother with cookies anymore

[BlackCobra43]

I simply deleted all my cookies, visited every site I *want* a cookie from and then set my cookies to be read-only. Worry-free AND all the benefits of good cookies!

I usually don't delete cookies ...

[maxwell demon]

... because I already don't let the browser set them.

Does the advertising industry also "lose" money because it cannot track if I am watching their ads on TV?

Let's put it like this

[Moraelin]

Let's put it like this: when you have someone whose very revenue depends on "detecting wolves", they'll cry "wolf!" All the time. They'll cry "wolf" at the neighbour's "alsacian wolf" dog even. I'm talking about anti-spyware and other "security" companies. Do they delete cookies? Well, I briefly had McAffee installed, and among other problems (such as being a piss-poorly programmed POS) it did exactly that. It tried to protect me from all those supposedly dangerous cookies, storing such "personal details" as the session ID on some site. I'm not kidding. Using half the sites that required logon (such as Gamespy's Fileplanet) was suddenly impossible. So based on that I'd say the concern is genuine. But it's probably not the users going through the menus to delete cookies. Joe Average probably wouldn't even know or care what a cookie is. But Joe Average likely has some POS security software installed that deletes the cookies for him

Re:Not that it would matter, but

[Dogers]

Some don't actually EVER expire..

Some, like Googles cookie, don't expire for ages!

(Googles cookie implodes some time around January 2039)

Firefox has poor cookie management

[plover]

Out of the box (or out of the 'download' folder, I should say) Firefox has really poor cookie management. I have it set to prompt, but once I deny a site permission and realize I want to do business with them it takes many mouseclicks and a lot of stupid scrollbar searching to hunt down the cookieblock and delete it.

There are some cookie management extensions out there, but for "normal" people to better manage their privacy (or even to realize they have privacy right that they can manage) I'd like to see "prompt always, deny third party" turned on by default, and a cookie toolbar/rightclick option that allows you to accept/decline/delete them. As a matter of fact, that would be a nice option for the Firefox installer: a checkbox that says something like "[ ] Help me manage my privacy rights online." We could debate whether or not it should be on or off by default.

Or, weirder yet, what about something like the infamous Clippy? "Hi, I'm Foxy, and I'm here to help you with online privacy so you don't become a victim of identity theft, or a pawn of corporate marketing strategies!"

Re:40% of the market is a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

That's ironic. He gets labeled informative and doesn't tell why it's a problem.

I don't see any problems, aside from advertising dollars drying up. But that's a moot point considering bandwidth is so cheap and if you want to throw up some kind of large, bandwidth consuming site you can generally run it on donation. That, and anywhere that has a decent product or service seldom needs to advertise it and when they do they don't make the big bright flashy "YOU WON A FREE PIECE-OF-SHIT" bouncing all over the screen in a flash ad game bullshit.

I hate advertising. I hate the way it advertises to women to destroy their bodies and then lie about who they are, I hate the way it advertises to men to be shovanistic dominating fucks, I hate the way it exploits need and social trust to enslave people into a process of consumption, I hate the way it educates kids about using their products for percieved, non-existant needs.
I hate the way the marketing books are written from a psychologists point of view.

Marketing works upon the communist dogma; build 1000 tracters, 1 works, rebuild the other 999 and get another working tracter, then do it again. You advertise to a kid to eat unhealthy food and watch TV, and to partake in stimulation culture. 15 years later, they're fat, unhealthy, and they're depressed becuase they can't stimulate themselves enough to get happy again (true happyness comes from controlling your wants). So you fix the situation with antidepressants, lyposuction, and a new diet and motivate them with images of supermodels and after even more money, they're to that level again. They become stupid, get pregnant, fake marrage, then what's the solution to that? Diapers, house, carpeting, divorce lawyers...and the kids get left infront of a television the whole time.

    Why? Because it destroys people. Even if I like something, I still hate advertising because once you're sold it becomes redundant.

Someone who does marketing is incapable of telling the truth. At least a lawyer can try.

Re:cookie swapping?

[Madcapjack]

Who needs to delete cookies? I just have a little program that overwrites the text with random text. Why? Well, spyware companies suck that's why. But you're not kicking them in the gut if you just delete the cookies. Nah, feed their databases with crap. That's what I say.

Re:No, but...

[murukusu]

I'm only accepting cookies from few sites and blocking all but google's text ads. I must say that since I started to surf like this, my user experience has improved vastly.