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Delete Cookies, Inflate Net Traffic Estimates
eldavojohn writes "In my browser, I regularly go to the tools menu and clear my private data. This includes my cookies. As a result, people like me who destroy cookies by the thousands may be inflating estimates of Web traffic by up to 150 percent. People have good reasons for clearing out cookies — we've heard about bad cookies before (and I think the FCC is still investigating the issue). But every time you delete cookies, many of the sites you've visited count you as a new visitor next time."
...you could be like me--I block all cookies from all sites until I've added them to my whitelist.
News at 11 -- Water still wet.
It's not that many people, compared to the hundreds of millions of people on the net. There are also other ways of tracking people like IP addresses possibly in combination with browser UA string.
I hadn't thought about counting it this way until this article appeared but, now that it's said, I'm not surprised. It doesn't matter what the consumer does. The business analysts will always find a way to spin it for their profit. Initially the business analysts thought that this would be a perfect way to track all of the visitors. When some of the visitors decided they didn't want to be tracked then the business analysts decided that, well, maybe tracking them (in that particularly way) wasn't the important metric for the shareholders to see. The more important number, obviously, is how many discrete visitors they have.
Brilliant.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
What happens with people who have cookies disabled? In this case each hit will be counted as a unique visitor, unless the site checks IP address or other details.
If the primary concern is for unique visitor tallies for traffic-based advertising, wouldn't web sites be affected (mostly) across the board? If all web traffic is artificially inflated close to the same amount, then this becomes a non-issue.
That assumes an awful lot of people do that.
I don't do it because it is a pain to constantly log back in everywhere. But I seriously doubt more than 2% of the non-slashdot crowd does it.
If cookies aren't reliable, find something else to do your estimates.
It's no rocketscience
The FCC has little reason to investigate cookies.
I finally have the secret to ultimate web traffic power! Now my alexa ranking will go through the roof! THROUGH THE ROOF, I TELL YOU!!!
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I delete cookies, permit them, leave them on, it is all my business. I am under no obligation to provide web site operators reliable count of how many uniqie visitors they get. They should stop complaining and develop better ways to count unique visitors. If they cant, it is still not my problem.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And believe me, you're not making a rich man richer, you're making a middle-class man better able to support his family.
Cookiesafe allows me to keep my permanent cookies to a minimum, yet allow me all the functionality of session cookies. Of course, it does inflate the stats as the article mentions. In my previous job I worked with stats quite a bit (using WebSideStory/Hitbox), and it is such an inexact science that it ranks right up there with Lies and Damn Lies.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/249 7
Anyone have other suggested software they prefer?
This is all so true -- but the same can be said for any method of tracking internet traffic. Think of the Alexa toolbar, or the new Compete toolbar (completely biased). This particular ramification will be more widespread, as the big traffic monitors like HitWise and ComScore who publish industry-standard numbers will be affected. So businesses that rely on those numbers should account for the skew (though, 10 years ago trend seekers relied solely on newspaper and magazine publishing stats to come up with numbers... yikes!). However, I find it hard to believe the article's report that "researchers found that 31 percent of U.S. Internet users erased their first-party cookies over the course of the month." Does 1/3 of the general public even know how a cookie works, never mind how to erase them? Side note -- the person with all the traffic data? Google. Making Analytics free has created such a huge install base, they have an amazing amount of traffic data. Scary what they could figure out.
...though it may be to some people.
Anonymous user stats are always going to be an estimate. Cookies aren't reliable, because people clear them. IP addresses aren't reliable, because some are dynamically generated, some are shared, and people move around.
You can only really know how many users you have if (a) they're registered and (b) they visit the site while logged in. (And even then, people could be sharing accounts -- bugmenot, anyone?)
Personally, I don't think this is a problem, as long as you're willing to look at the estimates for what they are and not treat them as if they were precise.
Hmm... how long before someone claims that Firefox's/Opera's/Safari's stats are inflated because they make it easier to wipe cookies than IE?
i think this is very wrong. who counts the number of cookies as bandwidth? the bandwidth is measured at the routers, if it's not, then dont read too much into bandwidth estimates as it's nothing more than a wet finger in the air.
Why UNIX?
So now instead of innocent webmasters naively listing more hit counts than they have, they'll just simply lie about their hitcounts to inflate the numbers.
The effect of this is what?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Most pointless article ever. Why the fuck do I care about people inflating their web traffic?
If you don't give stores your phone number, they may inflate their customer count.
Since I block javascript by default, I must be deflating at least some traffic statistics.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
If I go to the site twice, I go twice. If I delete my cache, I have to re-request everything on the page. In any case, I _AM_ causing more traffic.
It would be like saying you don't count as traffic for streets you've previously driven on.
My twitter
This is, you'll pardon me, rampant ignorance.
Most users of many sites come from businesses. Most businesses run users through a proxy. This means that a large number of users will come from the same IP. Also, many proxies have multiple IP's they rotate users through (AOL being a great example).
Sorry, tracking by IP is significantly less accurate than tracking by cookie.
But every time you delete cookies, many of the sites you've visited count you as a new visitor next time.
I have Firefox clear my cookies on browser close... So I look like a new visitor every time I visit a site.
Perhaps someone would explain to me why I should care about this? The only use I can see for unique visitor counts (other than the trivia value) involves ad revenue - And I aggressively block almost all adverts, so don't care about that, either.
Whatever happened to tracking new visitors or original IPs? I'm pretty sure that even the POS hosting company I use has those basic capabilities.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
I don't want you to know who I am dood...
There are too many other ways of tracking unique vs. returning visitors. If a site relies only on a tracking cookie, it's their own fault for misrepresenting the new hits to their site.
It's not the fault of the person who deletes the cookie. It's the fault of the website for relying on flimsy evidence.
Huh? Isn't the entire POINT of cookies pretty much so sites recognize you when you return? Sorry, but this statement wins todays "No Duh" award.
Open your cookies.txt and make subtle changes to the values. If we can encourage enough people to participate, we will rise above statistical noise to become the bane of online tracking systems.
seeing as how p2p occupies well over 80% of all internet activity due to its high bandwidth, Deleting cookies would need the amount of information in a typical webpage to increase at least threefold assuming absolutely everyone deletes cookies. given a more logical assumption that about 30% of people delete cookies that increase in internet activity is more like nine times the information. Keep in mind this doesn't take into account other internet activity (VOIP, video, etc) and that most likely, far fewer than 30% of people regularly delete cookies.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
it's the server sending the cookies, not the user. in fact, if the user is deleting the cookies then the HTTP request the user sends to the server is using less bandwidth. it's not my fault the server keeps sending me these god damn cookies.
I offset it by not having a spambot trojan in my system, so my addition to the unnecessary traffic is about on par with those who do have one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have a hard time believing that the 1% or so of paranoid people inflate web estimates by 150%.
is this article actually implying that web-sites decide whether or not to send you and updated file or assume you have the file cached based on the cookie? no, no sane web developer would do that.
yes, deleting your cookies may cause the server to user more resources (because it will have to add another row to it's "unique visitors" table in the database), but that is not "web traffic".
the only bandwidth i could possibly think of is that which is being used to specifically send the cookie to the client. and that's only going to happen when the client didnt send the cookie to the server. so a web site that requies everyone to have a cookie is going to have 1 cookie transaction for every request+response: either the client sending it or the server sending it.
Keep on clearing those cookies, advertisers pay for traffic :) More uniques means more money for me!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
No one in analytics worth their salt would take numbers at face value. It's about setting baselines and looking at trending. Getting exact numbers will never be possible based on technical limitations.
I can see investors being interested in the "new visitors" number, but advertisors are more interested in "page views" or ("unique visits" if they're more sophisticated).
Page views are pretty straightforward and won't be messed around by deleted cookies (they can be manipulated by other means).
Unique visits are usually handled using session cookies expiring after 30 minutes rather than persistent cookies, so clearing your cookies won't invalidate the effects. (And for the cynical, the use of session-cookies-expired-after-30-minutes is more or less an industry standard which the advertisers and ratings outfits insist on so they can compare like-with-like. They are, after all the ones paying the money, they like to get this sort of thing right).
This is ridiculous, "whine whine, we can't count unique visitors because people are disabling cookies" You couldn't count them before! People don't match up one to one with computers. I can use multiple computers and a computer can be used by multiple people.
If only there were some mathematical field, meant to deal with uncertainties like this.
...god kills a kitten!
I'm sure there are lots of reasons for doing it, but most bulletin boards that require registration in order to read, at least in my experience, do it in order to limit traffic, not count it. It's a way of keeping costs down, albeit at the expense of making the board less useful as a resource to the general public.
Unfortunately the best board relating to Knoppmyth is like this; it was just too expensive for the maintainer to run openly; the traffic cost too much. By requiring registration to read, it cut down on traffic enough to make it affordable. Given the choice between a register-before-reading board and no board at all, I think the public is best served by the former.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't think it's a question of fault. This is really a warning to webmasters, and to the advertisers who use the statistics.
I'm hard pressed to say how this is news exactly. It's really a press release from a company called comScore. Betcha they've got a service to provide more accurate counts that they'd be happy to sell you.
I never realized that Bit Torrent involved cookies.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
Why the exercise in counting the number of unique visitors instead of total page views? If you're measuring traffic on a bridge, you'd count how many cars cross it per day. Why care if the same guy crossed it 10 times?
I use a PC at work.
And another one at home, well even two sometimes.
And a smart phone equipped with a browser.
So I inflate web usage statistics with 100 to 300%?
And then there are people sharing the same PC/account deflating the stats...
All of us who host websites know how unreliable statistics are. Nothing new there...
X.
Oh boo hoo, cry me a river. Produce something people want and they'll come back time and again and you won't have to worry about your traffic.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
by using adblock and blocking all that flashy, crap, image traffic.
So, industry should thank me - oh, wait a moment...
There is a feature in Firefox that allows deleting persistent cookies at the end of the session. It was first introduced in IE6, called "downgrading" but the IE options do not allow configuring the cookie settings to use it.1 D6FA273C756!153.entry for an overview of downgrading.
See http://randomoracle.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!31E3
Downgrading can increase the skewing of user stats. Instead of having to wait for user manually deleting cookies, it happens automatically and each new session registers as a new unique user
By the way, rejecting all cookies does not skew user count statistics, because it is possible to detect that cookie was not set. As simple defense, the count should be incremented when cookie is received not when it is set.
As soon as you log on to a site connected with certain advertisers your brand new not you unique cookie is again linked back to your old account thru backend calls between advertisers and accounts. Yeah, there's a minor % that is wrong because of people using other's computers, but it's better than having people delete cookies being new customers again. Yeah, a lot of random sites you probably will never go to again don't know you from one to the other, but others get who you are from your cookie linked to their advertiser, and as soon as you log in to any of the sites that have the same advertiser, you're linked up again and some sites do it retroactively. Of course, if you want privacy, better than a cookie blocker is actually adblock and the filterset.g updater. Those give you more privacy than deleting your cookies. But yes, it's possible to track you past the cookies.
There's a few fingerprinting companies out there, track you by stuff plugins give away(dates, versions, etc.. anything the plugin will give up). I've even heard of a company using the time offset from your computer from your web browser(which passes the time back in milliseconds since 1970, IIRC) and combined with some other methods it really helps you track people down. Not to mention you can combine all this with your IP address and you're pretty good. But deleting cookies doesn't really help you, it's more of a minor inconvenience to the small companies who don't really care to track you that much, and a tiny hurdle to larger companies who do care and who are already doing it and some that even know you before the cookie. (Don't accept cookies? Check for that, and IP address, flash version, time offset(if it's possible), what plugins are installed via navigator.plugins and you're pretty close to a positive ID. Of course there are many other ways and I don't know any of them. So, delete your cookies if you want, but realize it's not much of a help.
Adblock is, and ultimately those who really want to track you probably can.
n/t
So what? Not my problem. And if sites didn't go so far out of their way to invade my privacy with cookies, I probably wouldn't feel compelled to clear them out as often and they'd have better stats. So I say again-- so what? They've made their bed, let 'em lie in it and stop complaining. Or else maybe work out a deal to get the RIAA to sue people who clear their tracking cookies...
Precisely. Make that five computers with as many public IPs for me. Google and my local newspaper must love how much traffic I generate every day. Inflation alert!
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
All the more reason to delete cookies often, or keep them from being set in the first place. With the exception of a few trusted sites.
I simply don't care, and can't fathom why I should care. It is not, never has been, and never will be my responsibility to ensure the accuracy of statistical reports on sites that I visit. What data is stored on my personal computer is my business, and nobody else's. Is there seriously anybody who thinks that this is actual news? Are there seriously people who are able to get funding for such intuitively obvious research? Where do I get my cut?
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
Since when did cookies go wireless? I though the FDA might look into issues with cookies... those darn girl scouts!
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Maybe websites "shouldn't" use cookies for tracking, but it's more effective than using IP so they will be used for cookies.
I tell firefox to treat all cookies as session cookies, with a whitelist of sites I trust or don't care if they track me. I stay logged in where I need to, and dump bad cookies without having the problems associated with not accepting cookies in the first place.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
So, you're the little bastard who keeps forwarding me that crap.
This year... no presents for you!!!
Sincerely,
Santa H. Claus
santa@northpole.net
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
I don't delete cookies because I don't accept them in the first place. I explicitly allow the sites where I want to be tracked, of course, like Slashdot, but everywhere else the browser is set to block everything by default. If the site doesn't work without cookies, you can allow session cookies, which is usually enough. Or, just leave. There are likely to be plenty of other sites with the same information but without the stupid cookie requirement.
As a developer, that's why I use the IP address and a database for storing user session data. Cookies are too unreliable
This is a pretty interesting find. I went over the math to see what the numbers really were, then I did it again, because I couldn't believe it. Turns out, only 5 people actually use the internet, all from the same library. This obviously raises a few rather important questions, but I think more or less explains everything else... Like why that book I just bought off amazon.com said 'property of Peterbourough public library' inside the cover
I have nothing compelling to say
I am not really current on browser operations, but I just make the cookies.txt file read only.
.txt file, but I don't do that too often.
Browser starts up, sites throw cookies at it, the cookies stay in memory until the browser is closed, and then start fresh the next time the browser is opened. I don't get permanent cookies written in my cookie.txt file ever. Of course I have to log in every time I start the browser too. I also "accept" all cookies, because I know they will not be written.
I guess the downside is that I have to look at the cookies from the browser vs the
Any other problems [security, etc] with this approach that I am missing?
OMG!!! Do not delete those cookies!!!1one
Every time you delete a cookie god kills a kitten.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
So they just realised cookie isn't a reliable way to track traffic?
Well, it took them long enough, surely they would find new and more accurate ways.
I use IP addresses instead for an idiotproof experience. http://www.idiotproofwebsite.com
Those of us who know how to delete cookies now and then and actually do are insignificant to the number of people who must constantly re-install Microsoft Windows, and by effect, clear all their cookies.
If I delete my cookies (and assuming the server doesn't just send me a whole bunch of new ones), aren't I lessening internet traffic? All your cookies for a given domain, path and protocol (http or https) will be sent with each and every request you make - and that includes image requests etc. made while rendering HTML. Surely the less cookies you transmit the better.
Following on from that, the less requests you make the better. At work we found that the number of individual requests made by an old-school internet page (tables & spacer images) with poor HTTP header caching values amounted to some ungodly bandwidth, and after we fixed the caching headers for the images etc, the load dropped off enormously. It goes to show how many requests your browser makes for you and also how many times it'll transmit all your relevant cookies to the server.
So get deleting...
Cheers
Mike
Perhaps there could be a projected amount of possible, individual IPA logs from an area based on a IP annual report of subscriber amounts, accessible through some web page or another. Then, end of the year web activity reports could be compared to possible number of individual hits based on number of subscribers. Or maybe I don't know enough about the internet to be giving input on this. Just thought I'd give a suggestion.
I recommend the CookieCuller firefox plugin to control cookies:
CookieCuller gives you the option to remove all non-protected cookies when firefox restarts. You choose which cookies, if any, that deserve protection.
I configure CookieCuller as follows:
Even if a site requires you to accept their long life cookies, on restart CookieCuller will toss your cookies! :-)
chongo (was here)