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."

On the other hand...

...you could be like me--I block all cookies from all sites until I've added them to my whitelist.

Re:On the other hand...

and be sure to set your browser to "googlebot"

That way no one has visited but another web spider!

Re:On the other hand...

I just forward all my cookies on to Santa - I get good presents

Oh boy...

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
[e-mail]

Re:On the other hand...

Hmmm. I wonder if this inflates the apparent popularity of Firefox (not that I consider that a bad thing, mind you).

After all,

1) it's geeks who tend to both use FF *and* block cookies
2) the FF extension architecture makes it easy to use selective cookie blocking tools
3) FF settings allow automatic cookie deletion each time it exits, unlike IE (=IE6, at least)

All in all, I suspect that (*IF* the subject article is accurate) FF users probably account for a disproportionately large chunk of those "re-visits".

I bet M$FT hates that.

Re:On the other hand...

On one hand, your post is intriguing and thought provoking.

On the other hand, this is slashdot and that kind of behavior is not allowed here. We demand you say something funny.

...And?

News at 11 -- Water still wet.

Re:Not users fault

It's not the fault of the person who deletes the cookie.

What you say there is absolutely correct, but it begs the question: How would it ever be the fault of the user in any possible case? I have a newsflash for the advertisers -- you do not have a God-given inalienable right to store data on my computer. It's mine, I paid for it, and I will selectively accept or freely remove any data that you attempt to place on it, for any reason or for no reason at all. The world does not owe anyone a reliable way to track the Web surfing of others.

This and DRM are two categories where marketers act like my personal property is theirs to do with as they please, and I'm sick of the way the average "consumer" puts up with this concept or anything resembling it.

Any Web site owner who doesn't like this can feel free to block me from their Web site; since it is theirs after all, I certainly do not dispute their right to do that (they would do so to find that I can live quite well without them). But please, let's dispose of this idea that some marketer not being able to track me is somehow my fault or my problem.

I say that if your business model relies on the ability to effectively spy on people, often without their knowledge or consent, then your business model is flawed and any difficulties you encounter are well-earned. I further say that the current situation exists only because of widespread ignorance; that is, if every single person who ever went online were a thoroughly educated uber-geek and fully aware of all tracking techniques used, then no one or practically no one would ever allow any of it and the marketers would have to come up with a more reasonable way to make money.

150%? Please

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.

Re:150%? Please

There are also other ways of tracking people like IP addresses possibly in combination with browser UA string.

Unless you're on a corporate network behind a NAT with a standard-issue OS install with a standardized browser.

No surprise

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.

Disabled Cookies?

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.

So what?

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.

Re:So what?

If all web traffic is artificially inflated close to the same amount, then this becomes a non-issue.

True. But I'm certain some websites have a higher proportion of visitors with cookies disabled... slashdot, for example. The trick, then, in order to make discrete visitor metrics truly useful (from a marketing standpoint) is to normalize for cookies-disabled visitors. Some factors that would have to be considered are how many cookies-disabled visitors access your site, and whether disabled visitors exhibit the same repeat visit habits as enabled visitors.

This is why there is research out there to use methods other than cookies and IP addresses to identify users -- see this article [slashdot.org] from last September.

I'm sure this concept can get some VC if companies begin distrusting current traffic anlayses -- it would be a useful adjunct to traditional traffic monitoring.

150%?

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.

FTC, not FCC

The FCC has little reason to investigate cookies.

Re:FTC, not FCC

That's funny, maybe you should tell them...

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/15/16 22251 [slashdot.org]

Re:FTC, not FCC

Obviously you didn't see the sesame street where Cookie Monster called Big Bird a "nappy headed ho"

The worst part is that they didn't fire Cookie Monster him until the letter Q and the number 4 pulled their sponsorship. Of course, I think he didn't need to go on Bert and Ernie's talk radio program either because they're hypocrites themselves.

At last!

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!!!

What I do in my computer is my business

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.

Re:What I do in my computer is my business

While I mostly agree with your sentiments (I don't think anyone said it was your obligation) --- to be the devil's advocate: if they can't make money and shut down their site, it does become your problem.

Small businesses

Deleting cookies makes life difficult for the small businesses struggling to grow. I try very hard to optimize my advertising costs with Google, and if I can't figure out if you've already visited I'm going to miscalculate. I'm not saying you owe me anything, but please don't go out of your way to delete cookies simply out of some feeling of empowerment. My cost of acquiring new customers makes an enormous difference in my bottom line, and the more accurately I can gauge that the better I can run my business.

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 is my current favourite

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 [mozilla.org]

Anyone have other suggested software they prefer?

Totally agree -- though hard to believe the extent

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.

Not a surprise

...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?

just plain wrong

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.

Visitors vs. Unique Visitors..anyone?

But every time you delete cookies, many of the sites you've visited count you as a new visitor next time.

Yea in like 1999 this was true. Don't most websites that actually care about traffic or try to reasonably measure it go off of UNIQUE VISITORS? I think the most basic of webstats programs for 5+ years now know and show the difference. What exactly is the point of all this? Who realistically tracks their users and bases their counts off of cookies? This is absurd. IP address has been the standard for quite some time now.

people are self-reporting anyway, so what?

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?

It Probably Evens Out

Since I block javascript by default, I must be deflating at least some traffic statistics.

Inflate the estimate?

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.

Umm... So?

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.

Stats...

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.

Huh?

But every time you delete cookies, many of the sites you've visited count you as a new visitor next time."

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.

Obviously doesn't consider p2p, VOIP, video or...

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.

server's fault, not the user

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.

Well... ok

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.

Geez...

I have a hard time believing that the 1% or so of paranoid people inflate web estimates by 150%.

wait

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.

Fine by me

Keep on clearing those cookies, advertisers pay for traffic :) More uniques means more money for me!

Every time you delete cookies...

...god kills a kitten!

Re:Every time you delete cookies...

Approximately 70,000 [icraeastbay.org] dogs and cats are born in the U.S. each day, or 25,567,500 each year. Of these, roughly 54% [petpopulation.org], or 13,806,450, are cats. Since 34.5% [rapidvet.com] of cats don't live to see their first birthday, we can assume that about 4,763,225 kittens die each year in the United States alone. We'll take for granted that God in His divine Wisdom purposely smote each of these kittens.

Let's assume that the idiom is talking only about male masturbation. Let's further assume, highly conservatively, that males do not start masturbating until they reach age 15. Of the total U.S. male population, 107,199,356 [census.gov] would then be masturbation-age males. Again, let's conservatively estimate that teenagers masturbate no more frequently than adults, and that all men masturbate an average of 20 times [wikipedia.org] each month or 240 times per year. This means that each man in the United States masturbates approximately every 1.5 days. It also means that there are approximately 25,727,845,440 male masturbation sessions in the United States each year.

There are nearly 26 billion male masturbation sessions in the U.S., yet there are fewer than five million kitten deaths annually. Far from a one-to-one correlation, there are 5401.5 masturbation sessions for every single kitten death. This means that the average American man can masturbate regularly for 22.5 years before he is responsible for the death of a single kitten. Indeed, with a life expectancy of less than 75 years, the average man will be responsible for only two or three kitten deaths in a lifetime of vigorous masturbation.

That's nothing, think of people use muliple PC's

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.

Yeah, we know

As the article from 2005 that I linked to in a comment from yesterday [slashdot.org], advertisers are going apeshit over people like me who delete cookies and skew their traffic results.

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.

Privacy is an illusion

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.

So what?

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...

Why would I care?

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?

Cookies by the FCC?

Since when did cookies go wireless? I though the FDA might look into issues with cookies... those darn girl scouts!

That explains quite a bit.

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

Has anybody thought of the consequences?

OMG!!! Do not delete those cookies!!!1one

Every time you delete a cookie god kills a kitten.

          -dZ.

not me

I use IP addresses instead for an idiotproof experience. http://www.idiotproofwebsite.com [idiotproofwebsite.com]

Insignificant compared to windows re-installs

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.

So how many cookies are sent with the HTTPRequest?

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

IPA Registry?

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.

Re:... and

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.

Give it a break; you had a valid point first time round, second time is excusable, third similar post from the same person (AC or not, it obviously is) just smacks of trying to get attention.