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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?"
[...]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.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Cookies are delicious delicacies.
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 never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
... 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?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Cookies are a sometimes food.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
Mozilla/Firefox can. Just tell it to set all cookies as session cookies.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Some don't actually EVER expire..
Some, like Googles cookie, don't expire for ages!
(Googles cookie implodes some time around January 2039)
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
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!"
John
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
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.
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!
Cookies aren't evil. They are just misused, and misunderstood.
There's nothing wrong with using cookies to prevent me from having to logon to Slashdot 10 times a day. And there is nothing wrong with cookies telling Amazon.com that people who buy Movie X also like to buy Book Y. That is useful anonymous marketing information. I actually LIKE it when Amazon recommends things to me, because they are usually right!
The problem is when the cookie stays around for days and you never get a login prompt: that's a security problem. Or when marketers build long-term profiles on you, then try to grab identifying information from other sites you use.
I have Mozilla set to delete cookies every day, which seems to be the best balance. (Firefox unfortunately does not have this option).
Here's what I do.
/. so I don't have to log in everytime.
Get Firefox to turn ALL cookies into session cookies by deleting them "when I close Firefox" in options.
Then make exceptions for the sites you want to track you. I do this for
From the article;
This anticookie fervor also hurts the deleters, she says. For example, cookies help a computer limit how many times the user is exposed to annoying ads like a floating, animated message. Since when should you trust a site not to annoy you with ads, block popups and use Adblock and Flashblock.
"...So cookies are a really good thing for managing the user's experience," she said." If this was true, we'd all be installing adware on our computers to deliver 'interesting relevant and targetted' advertising to enrich our web experiences wouldn't we? Bah!
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.
t tacks
For session tracking, cookies are now the standard, but there are other security precautions that can only accomplished by including a unique ID in every form.
Go read up about "session riding" or "cross-site request forgery". For example:
http://shiflett.org/articles/foiling-cross-site-a
See the code sample near the end of the page, under "Force the use of your own HTML forms".
where there's fish, there's cats
About once a week or two I'll get a few idle minutes, playing with my laptop while making dinner, and I'll just start opening up cookies and changing the data in there. Not to try to impersonate someone else, but just as every person's duty to scribble nonsense on some moron's database.
It's fun. It probably doesn't do anything, but it kills a minute or two of time, and it's more fun than "bejewled".
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.
Logic, macros, and more
"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?!
But then you are depending on those with money to share content. I worked with a site for a video game mod last year. Great site, no adds, wonderful content (and mod files sizes in the magnitude of Megs). Worked off of donations, a few bucks here, a few bucks there would cover the bandwidth needs. After a while, the site's popularity grew, some links from other very popular sites to this site drove the bandwidth and server load through the roof. The site admin bumped the server to a tougher server, which could handle it, and eventually the guy running the site had to pay for a much higher end hosting solution and bandwidth. That shot his relatively low bandwidth bill to way beyond that of what a part time pet project could justify. He started enforcing free registration, and added google adds, which helped, but the cost of thousands apon thousands of users downloading multiple files from 1 meg to 50 megs was extremely costly, even with 3 mirrors. He added more advertising to help cover the cost. And the site is still up today.
Acording to your point of view, he should not have taken any advertising, because it would push people away from his site, but had he not taken any advertisment, his site would be perpetually unreachable until no one visted it due to it's instability.
Advertising, whether you like it or not, is what allows people with limited budgets to maintain high bandwidth publications.
-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'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.