Net Marketers Worried as Cookies Lose Effectiveness 556
Saint Aardvark writes "The Globe and Mail reports that Internet
marketers are worried about the decreasing persistence of cookies.
Almost 40% of surfers delete them on a monthly basis, says
Jupiter Research -- a fact one marketers attributes to incorrect associations with spyware and privacy
invasion. United
Virtualities' Flash-based tracking system is mentioned as a possible
substitute...though they don't mention the Firefox plugin that removes
them, or talk in any meaningful way about why people
might want cookies gone. Still, the article is a good overview of
life from the marketer's perspective."
Sadly (Score:2, Insightful)
Its a mircale that marketing firms are not claiming to 'own' the cookies and sue you if you delete them for destruction of property.
Incorrect association? (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The other side of things. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do companies think that it is important to not tell a user up front that they are going to get a cookie w/o logging in?
Yeah, they might have been paying your wages and you were just doing your job but I don't see how aggregating statistics need to be done via cookies. Can't you do it through your logs?
Re:The other side of things. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, yes it does. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that still make me evil?
Yep.
If you have the *ability* to do it, then somebody in your organization eventually will decide that it sounds like a good idea.
This is why all my browsing is cookie-free (or rather, cookies being allowed on a whitelist basis and everything else removed on browser shutdown). I don't want you to have that ability to track what I do on your site for very long. Regardless of whether you use that ability or not, I don't trust you to behave properly with that information. Why should I? I don't know you.
Flash tracking? like hell (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't seem to have dawned on marketers that many, many people already associate Flash with "annoying advertising", "high CPU usage for nothing" and "general nuisance", and that it is disabled in many browsers as a consequence.
Speaking for myself, Flash is disabled. When I need it occasionally (that is, when I happen to want to play this [princeofpersiagame.com] about once a year), I re-enable it. But otherwise, I've yet to see a website sporting Flash that doesn't use it for useless eye-candy or advertising.
Re:Sadly (Score:1, Insightful)
Marketers are asshats who believe the world owes them a stage.
Re:Yes, yes it does. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flash cookies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes, yes it does. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you insist the security tapes are turned over when you shop at stores? Do you pay only in cash? Its hard to pay cash online, but presumably you use credit cards. Why do you trust them with your info? Its easy to track where you shop with that.
Do you know the people at your bank? At Visa/MC? The processor? How about the people at the stores you shop at? Do you not use any of those shopper cards at the grocery store (I don't)? No Costco membership, or library card?
You know, you're logged into
Re:The other side of things. (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem is that we let marketeers get their hands on this technology. Who was the bright spark that told some PHB you could track customers habits and browsing patterns with cookies. Control freaks cant help themselves, cookies have been abused and now we lose them as a tool for serious problem solving. Whatever the replacement, as long as marketeering Golgafrinchans get their mits on it then it will be abused to achieve unsavoury aims and people will disable it. There is no technological problem here, only one of human nature and the lesson of not giving access to powerful technologies to idiots.
Tinfoil hat security... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I? I don't know you
Do you know your bank? I mean apart from the front-end office that takes your money?
Do you know VISA, AMEX, Mastercard or whatever credit card you use?
If you have the *ability* to do it, then somebody in your organization eventually will decide that it sounds like a good idea.
And this is paranoia on crack... it assumes that people will ALWAYS do the wrong thing and will ALWAYS try and screw you about, and that customer profiling NEVER results in a better service.
Feel happy in your paranoia, me I just assess risk on a site by site, and business by business basis.
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not? Buying things online means, at worst, giving out info from a credit card. If they prove untrustworthy, then I call up the credit card company and reverse the charge. Trust does not have to be involved to engage in a purchase. You buy from people you don't any basis of trust for all the time.
However, WTF would he need to know I came back to his site later? WTF would he need to know that I visited his site several times over a period of a week and eventually purchased something? Why would he need to know what products I looked at each of those times I visited? That information could be used to build up information about me that I might not want him to have. He doesn't have need for that information, and since I don't trust him, I should attempt to deny him the ability to collect that information.
Furthermore, if he's a marketer, he can place his ads on several sites and track me via cookies from site to site. He can see what sites I frequent, he can see my reading habits... once I buy something from a site, he can track that and correlate all this to my identity.
I'm not paranoid, because I don't think anybody is actually doing this sort of thing at the moment. However, the capability is there. I remove cookies to make this sort of thing that much harder to accomplish. Not because I think they are doing it, but because the potential is there for them to do it.
Why do they need to persist until 2035? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Too Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
It's too bad a small group, as usual, ruins it for the majority.
Re:The other side of things. (Score:3, Insightful)
The simplest example I can think of is one Java based web application I was one of the deveopers for. We had to deal with secure logins, we had eCommerce and a variety of other things that are mostly irrelevant. But the big thing was intercepting more than one person attempting to login with the same id, as well as session timeouts. This was further complicated by the fact that we had certain pages that users were expected to go to, and spend 10-20 minutes reading without generating another page hit.
So what we ended up doing was correlating IP addresses, user ids and page identifiers along with timestamps to track a user through the site by way of session level Java Beans and validate if a user had timed out, if it was the same one attempting to log back in after exiting their browser in a way that didn't terminate a session, or another IP attempting to log in to a busy account.
This info was stored on the server side, and from it we could assemble user flow and page use statistics without ever using a cookie or piece of Javascript.
And before anyone says anything, yes we did have strict privacy policies and agreements in place with our clients since access to the application had to be purchased in the first place.
Re:The other side of things. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would bet 50% or more of the current web traffic is aggregated behind those 2 items. Makes IP based tracking useless.
Marketers have only themselves to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
They abused TV commercials, and that brought about "commercial skip" VCRs and TiVo.
They abused pop-ups, and that brought about pop-up blockers.
They abused Flash to make more attention-getting (read: obnoxious) banner ads, and that brought about Flashblock.
They abused cookies, now people obsessively delete them if they allow them to be created at all.
Am I the only one who sees a pattern here?
~Philly
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I go to the gas station, the attendant does not put a tracking device on the car that keeps track of everything I look at in the store and allows him to take note of whether I stop off for gas with one of his competitors.
Here's the problem: companies are impersonal. So are websites. No amount of "tracking" will make a website seem like a conversation with anohter person. If you want my opinion, ask for it. Either way, I will be deleting cookies from your website every day.
Know their customers?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
But they don't know me. They will never know me.
"Knowing me" means knowing my name, shaking hands, asking me about things we've discussed in the past. That's being friends with somebody. That's knowing them. That's what your idea of the "clerk who recognizes your face" is about, no? The little guy running the corner market, sort of thing.
Some dude running a website on the opposite side of the country will never know me. At best, he'll know what I've bought from him and other website owners that he shares information with or advertises with. Knowing what I buy doesn't mean he "knows me". It means he's treating me as an impersonal entity to be exploited, somebody to attempt to get more money from. It doesn't mean he's treating me as a fellow human being deserving of respect and friendship.
No, fuck that, I'll remain a stranger to that guy across the country running a website, and I'll know the guy who sells me my fresh fruit down on the corner market, and I'm quite comfortable with that and don't see it as a conflict whatsoever.
Re:The other side of things. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Thanks to the prevalence of proxies, log data should be considered nearly useless.
Re:Don't delete cookies (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, tough .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies like doubleclick and the ones who seem to only serve up annoying advertising have no expectation that I will a) accept their cookie (if you're not the site I'm visiting, why do you get a cookie?) or b) even if I did accept their cookie, that I would keep it.
The real world would be tagging your clients. Someone comes in to browse, you snap an ear collar on him. You walk into another store, someone wants to stamp the back of your hand indicating that you've shopped there.
I had a person at my door asking if I'd received my flyers -- when I told her than if I had I'd tossed them in the bin, she wanted my name and phone number. What part of I'm not interested in your flyer, and you don't need my contact info to respond to this?
I wouldn't accept K-Mart putting a radio tracking collar on me, WTF do on-line marketers think they're any different?
Re:The other side of things. (Score:3, Insightful)
what we need (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, yes it does. (Score:3, Insightful)
Contemporary life does not provide us with the option of trusting every entity with whom we interact. Do you trust your electric utility and their outsourced billing department? What about the clerk behind the counter at the gas station who now has your credit card number, license plate and photograph? What about that cable company and their computing hardware embedded in your home?
The parent recognizes that some power is left to him in the form controlling cookies. He is well aware of the fact that his business on the Internet isn't truly anonymous, but why make it easy? Controlling cookies raises the bar, usually above the level of nefarious bastards that use collected information to their own ends. Calling this "paranoia" is dismissive exaggeration.
Complaining about the ineffectiveness of cookies is foolish. If you're really providing so much value to your customer that tracking their activity is going to provide real benefits, the customer won't mind maintaining an account with you. Otherwise you're just providing some marketing slug with ammunition.
Re:Monthly basis? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is the possibility that a large enough group of companies collaborating could use the information to link purchases and browsing habits together. But I really don't care. They want to try to personalize my ads, that's fine too. Why? Because it's a free lunch. They think they're convincing me to buy stuff, when in fact I don't give a fuck. As long as the illusion is maintained, I'm happy to let them think they're learning valuable information about me. If this avenue is cut off to advertisers, either the free lunch will end or something more insidious will take its place.
Most companies only care about using cookies to keep track of visitors to their site anyway, and this can be useful to improve the site. A site that uses tracking information to see what other sites you visit (which is difficult without having their ads directly on other sites, which usually isn't the case because someone else usually hosts the images) and sells your email address is probably not one you want to continue purchasing from.
Re:Know their customers?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
I see those things perfectly clearly. However, unlike yourself, I also see that they probably do not have my best interests in mind when they are trying to "sell me stuff". My best interest is to deny them the ability to more effectively sell me stuff and use my own damn brain to decide what I want to buy, eh?
Re:Tracking customer behavior (Score:5, Insightful)
I went to his competitor up the street, bought the same printer. I told the story to the store manager there, who had a nice laugh and was happy to get my money.
Re:The other side of things. (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, so tell your customers that: if a cookie isn't accepted, take them to a page that tells them,
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Holy crap that's a lot of work. I simply changed my preferences to "delete cookies at shutdown" and then add sites I want to remember me on a site-by-site basis.
Far, far simpler. Far, far more effective. When I find a new site and decide I want them to remember me, I simply add that new site to the whitelist. No hosts file slowdown (and no need to maintain the hosts file), no need to change any settings which don't work in the long run (what if I visit originating website directly somehow?), no need to use an adblocker (not for that purpose anyway). It's simple, it's low maintainance, it's more effective. What isn't there to like? So it screws up some poorly designed website's privacy-invading user-tracking statistical analysis. Tough shit to them then.
Re:The other side of things. (Score:2, Insightful)
The real issue is the handful of companies with ads that are pervasive. I get a nice little prompt each time someone tries to set a cookie on my machine. (I do this out of curiousity, more than a privacy concern.) Doubleclick ads show up all over the place. Even worse, I see cookies being set from *.207.net from everywhere.
Try to go to www.207.net - it is a blank page. They want to track you, but they don't want you to easily see who they are. Those cookies are set by an online marketing giant Omniture.
I can block all future cookies for this 207.net domain, but they never use the same one twice. So you cannot have a blanket deny for all 207.net cookies. One site will have 398jdije.207.net - the next may be 39du39.207.net.
It is this type of deliberate obfuscation that earns my distrust.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, Sherlock, we're talking about the marketers like Doubleclick here. Doubleclick has banners on countless websites. Each banner's picture has the website it's displayed on encoded in the URL. Additionally, they set cookies from the domain doubleclick.net. Now what happens? Doubleclick can track you because each of their banners on all sites they have a banner on can read the cookie.
Expiration Date? (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla (and firefox) makes it easy, set network.cookie.lifetimePolicy to 3 and then set network.cookie.lifetime.days to the maximum number of days a cookie can stay.
I have mine set to 2, if I visit a site and don't come back within 2 days, I think it's safe I won't miss anything by having them remember me.
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong question. The correct question is what do I have to gain by them amassing this info on me and my activities?
I can't think of anything that would be to my benefit, which is more than enough reason to put a stop to it, IMO.
Re:Store Clerk vs. Web Admin (Score:3, Insightful)
The same goes for the website you visit.
It's not a privilege to collect your data, it's a necessary part of sending you the information you've requested. Your HTTP request contains plenty of valuable data that you claim infringes on your privacy. Though I'm a privacy nut myself, I think your complaints go too far.
You can either accept the logging/tracking/analysis or you can stop using the web. It's pretty simple.
Re:The other side of things. (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd hope that would be true, but historically that has not been the case. A google for "cookie exploits", "cookie migration" and even a browse of IE "domain" bugs shows this to be true.
The carefulness of web developers has nothing to do with anything.
Really? Some years ago I noticed that the FriendsReunited.co.uk website set a cookie after I'd logged in, along the lines of "confirmeduser=23959".
What happened if I modified the cookie? Yep, you guessed it... ability to modify somebody elses details.
As a web developer, I know that cookies are a good solution to the problem of maintaining state in a stateless medium
If the medium is stateless there is no solution. You mean "as a lazy developer, cookies work most of the time"?
As a web developer
I'm guessing you claim cookies to be "good" because your development environment/web-server is not configured to allow anything else? Why not just append a "&sessionid=[big binary data]" to all your page links? I'm guessing that, despite being a "web developer" you are not given the ability to do so
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. And guns don't kill people.
The only time they can get this information is if a third party has an Ad, or some other content on both sites
Exactly. And the only time a gun is dangerous is when it is loaded and pointed at you.
Your car always has it's license plate, and so they can see who it is.
No one tracks license plates. The benefits of tracking them are far outweighed by the costs.
You like visiting well designed websites right?
You like candy, don't you, little girl? What I am getting (a well-designed web site) is far outweighed by what I am giving up (all my privacy). Besides, what good is a web designer who can't design a web site without my coerced assistance?
You are being too paranoid.
Re:Know their customers?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are not valuable, your information is, but not on its own, nobody is sufficiently important to warrant any company to change its habits based on one customer. Once information is collated and processed, it becomes immensely powerful and profitable, that is what these companies seek.
Your cookie contents are data, the collation, manipulation and processing of said data becomes information, to be used and/or sold to improve the experience of the customer and the profits of the company.
If they did what they said they would do . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
In theory, having cookies to track where you go and what you do is a good thing. It allows marketers to target ads at you for stuff you are actually interested in. If they actually did that.
Unfortunately, they don't. They use it to bombard you with constant, endless ads for "related stuff", to the point where you can't actually see the content on the web page you want to read.
Or they decide that looking at Corvette pictures means you think your penis is too small, and therefore "natural male enhancement" is a "related product."
To hell with 'em all.
Re:Tracking customer behavior (Score:5, Insightful)
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
You are taking out your annoyance on someone who has: a) No real interest whatsoever in whether or not you buy X piece of crap (unless they get commissions on sales) and b) No control over the policy, the system, and in most cases, the cash register either. They might be able to get around it (as the clerk did in the OP's post), but that's not the point
The point I'm making here is this: don't get pissed at some clerk or manager at a chain store for following store policy, or expect them to change it for you, even if it's a dumb policy.
I've worked at department stores and grocery stores, etc - it sucks. And you know what? The only people I ever really disliked when I worked any retail job were the people who thought it was MY store and MY decision to harass them for a phone number/address, whatever. These are the people that expect you to break the rules for them (c'mon, you can just give me the discount, I forgot my coupons), then treat you like shit when you follow the rules of the company that puts the paycheck in your hand at the end of the week.
It was store policy to ask for a phone number, the register prompted for it, and we're supposed to ask. If we got shopped by a "secret shopper" or a manager caught us ignoring it, that's our ass, not the customer's. On behalf of all past, present and future retail employees: We don't care what your personal information is. We care about our paycheck and about following the rules of the job.
I agree that it should only take one polite refusal to avoid having to give out your information. Just keep in mind that the manager may have to give approval, and in the larger chains, even the manager may not have the power to negate store policy. Either way, the bottom line is even if the manager has the ability to counteract the policy, they don't care. The manager at Best Buy is not sitting at home in a deep depression because you bought your printer at Circuit City instead.
Re:The other side of things. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The other side of things. (Score:1, Insightful)
As mentioned before, there is a way to do it without cookies for what ever reason cookies are not available.