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More Cookie Investigations

Posted by Zonk on from the chocolate-chip-or-oatmeal-raisin dept.

FancyKetchup writes "This time, C|Net is caught up in cookie paranoia with their 'special investigation' into use of cookies on the Senate and House representative websites." From the article: "Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for instance, has been a longtime advocate of strict privacy laws to restrict commercial Web sites' data collection practices. In a statement posted on his own Web site, McCain assures visitors that 'I do not use 'cookies' or other means on my Web site to track your visit in any way.' But visiting mccain.senate.gov implants a cookie on the visitor's PC that will not expire until 2035. " Follow up to a story we reported on earlier.

2 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Lazy sensationalist journalism by Dynamoo · · Score: 4, Informative
    Cookies schmookies.. everything will be in the server logs anyway. And doesn't the DHS collate all ISP data in any case? The violations of privacy that people should be concerned about are not a few tracking cookies, but are in fact a widespread and ongoing monitoring and profiling of the activities of all internet users. And not just in the US either, this is common in Europe too. Really CNET and other media outlets are bleating about something that's irrelevant and are missing the real story.

    Also, having a go at the White House for using WebTrends to collect and analyse visitor data is nuts. When you've got a busy and important site like that, good quality analytics are vital. If they didn't have them, you'd probably find the media criticising the White House for not knowing about their visitor demographics, popular pages etc etc.

    That article really just smacks of lazy journalism. Whatever next.. discovering their PC has a "Temporary Internet Files" directory?

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  2. Session strings instead by tetranz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ben Forte of ColdFusion fame has quite a good reply to the cookie news items.
    I wonder if the government anti-cookie rule / recommendation / whatever it is exactly, has caused some developers to avoid even session cookies by using URL strings instead. These are less secure than cookies because they end up in web logs, get bookmarked, emailed etc. Despite what another post said, I don't think cookie values generally end up in logs.
    I admit to using session strings myself because a few years ago lots of people were scared into turning cookies off in their browser. That doesn't seem to be much of a problem these days. I hope this misguided publicity is not going to trigger a return of those days. Likewise for Javascript.