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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?
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 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.
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