Slashdot Mirror
The Slow Death of the Internet Cookie (axios.com)
Sara Fischer, writing for Axios: Over 60% of marketers believe they will no longer need to rely on tracking cookies, a 20-year-old desktop-based technology, for the majority of their digital marketing within the next two years, according to data from Viant Technology, an advertising cloud. Why it matters: Advertising and web-based services that were cookie-dependent are slowly being phased out of our mobile-first world, where more personalized data targeting is done without using cookies. Marketers are moving away from using cookies to track user data on the web to target ads now that people are moving away from desktop. 90% of marketers say they see improved performance from people-based marketing, compared with cookie-based campaigns.
What replaces it? How do they accomplish individual tracking?
>Advertising and web-based services that were cookie-dependent are slowly being phased out of our mobile-first world, where more personalized data targeting is done without using cookies. Don't mobile devices have cookie support? Or do mobile devices provide tracking features that are better than what cookies provided?
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
The cookie is what really is the so-called pay-'wall' of the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian etc.
Delete them and you can read as much as you want.
The cookies are gone, from now on it will be .... Cake, or biscuits or chips
either way, at the end of the day, all of them will end up in the restroom
Cookies were never meant for marketing. They really broke the internet. So many people are afraid of enabling javascript or cookies because they don't want to be tracked, so legit services are hampered by this.
Hey paranoid idiots-- heed this story. They don't need your dumb cookies. You're being tracked anyway. Now stop acting like your privacy is being violated just because a cookie is needed to make the website work.
So the cookie is dying. The article says nothing about how we will be tracked in the future. Or how we are being tracked now when I reject cookies.
It means they've found easier ways to fingerprint you. [PDF] Marketers don't want generic "cookies" they want specific, verified identification.
They're going to have a better spy network than is legal for most governments to have.
Cannabis edible. Sure, you'll be tracked, but it just won't matter so much.
Fingerprinting is replacing tracking and has been for at least 10 years when I was very peripherally involved with testing a company that did it for work.
It's one way they get you with cookies once you've "cleared" them and they are able to reattach the same ones as before.
EFF has testing: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
And yes, multiple fingerprints can be attached to a single user. You have 10 unique devices and all 10 of those fingerprints get attached to you after logging into a site or account. It can take awhile, but you can't block it.
Slight changes are accounted for, profiles updated. It's not as "fool-proof" as cookies, but that's not really a requirement.
I'm getting concerned that browser-makers, in the interests of privacy and security, are clamping down so much on what websites can do with cookies, local data, and iframes, that they're weakening the power of the open Web relative to mobile apps that ask, and almost always get, permission to do all sorts of powerful things. Perhaps it's time for cookie and iframe permission requests to pop-up when a website is first used, so that trusted sites can still do powerful things.
You know you're on a mainstream news site when nobody objects to the term "Internet cookie". Jesus. What's next, Internet pages?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I work in tech support, and after years and years of scare pieces on the news, this has been a long time coming. A large percentage of the people I work for are paranoid about all cookies. Cookies are bad! Cookies will destroy your computer! Some of these people clear out ALL their cookies daily or weekly, even though I've told them they only need to be concerned with scanning for tracking cookies.
Not that we should cater to ignorance, and not that this problem won't go away once there are no more Boomers to hold these views. But I do feel like if you get better results with other kinds of advertising, tracking cookies are a stupid form of marketing because every anti-malware tool available knows how to remove them and will encourage users to do so.
It seems to me that there's an awful lot of misinformation here. Cookies have been given a bad name, because the moment they sprung into existence, they were misused and/or abused by advertisers and marketers. The reality is, cookies aren't going away at all... they're just being used more inline with their original intent, that's all. A cookie gives any standard web browser (including those on mobile devices) the feature of storing small chunks of identifying personal data ("login" data) for the user currently using that browser, in order to allow that user to personalize their experience on any given website. (If you're using a mobile app instead of a browser, than that app obviously doesn't need cookies; it can just use local memory natively to store your login credentials.) The abuse started when advertisers realized that they didn't need you to actively "login" to their service, in order to identify you and track you with cookies. Naturally, people don't like it when someone tracks them without first asking for permission... but that's not the cookies fault; they're just tools. A hammer is still intended to be used on nails, even when someone with no scruples uses it on your toes -- but nobody ever blames the hammer for that, and rightly so.
So in other words, "people based marketing" just means that the service you're actively logging into (such as Google, for example) has successfully established themselves as the primary marketer, and they've made arrangements to sell all of your activity to advertisers. Likewise, those advertisers no longer see much return-on-investment in doing the heavy lifting of attempting to gather all of that activity data themselves, in part because so many people have gone to great lengths to stop those advertisers from doing so. Which brings us back to simple the fact that: you're really the product that's being marketed, and the advertisers are the customers. (Which is just as it has always been, really.)
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
Once I had access to server-side processing, like ASP and PHP, I found the use case for cookies to be really small. That would be, basically, using the cookie to keep track of sessions. Besides that, the 4KB limit really hindered what you could do, as all of the metadata (property names, expiration dates, etc) counted towards the limit. I'd hit all sorts of edge cases like where it would partially store or unexpectedly forget stuff. Not really worth the trouble.
Since when does The Guardian have a paywall? It offers an optional subscription to ad-free access for $84/year. Slashdot used to offer subscriptions, but this broke years ago.
This sounds like an article that is justifying what Firefox is doing: dropping cookie management from the newest version. I don't agree, and I insist that Firefox keep some sort of cookie management facility.
I use privacy guard on my phone and block all unnecessary traffic. Not to mention i do not install random apps and use fdroid anyways.
And yes, there are several clever, tin-foil hat, Slashdotters who have managed to evade this tracking...but on aggregate the marketers are fine with the percentages they have.
The article does not say they aren't tracking us anymore, they instead say the cookies are obsolete.
But it failed to mention what is replacing cookies.
That's far more important than the death of cookies.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Cookies could have easily been first-party (origin-only) since the beginning. It is virtually the same design pattern to persist a cookie as it is to persist a session ID in the URI. Shopping carts and tracking codes existed before cookies. If it were just created for shopping carts, it would have been first-party only. If it were created for both, it would be open to all origins. Thus, it was created for both purposes.
Why do you think the Referer header was created? It allows sessions to be persisted without even needing to embed them in links. Remember, back when cookies were created, the web was primarily portal-driven, not search-driven. The purpose of the cookie is to persist you when you come back to the portal through a type-in, without you needing to login. The shopping cart issue was already solved. The tracking is the *primary* reason it exists. It is also the *primary* reason it is not double-keyed with origin today. The reason for them is the constant. Otherwise, you need to explain why the reason would be different.
Also, that is not what people-based marketing means. Look it up. How do you get +5 Interesting with basic facts so incorrect?
Can tell me why they can put something on my computer and its a crime if I put something on theirs.