At 2004-04-16 09:34, Dave Baldwin / DIBsed wrote: >Jaap van Ganswijk wrote: >> Cookies are much more a good thing than a bad thing for the user, >> although popular media like newspapers try to convince us that >> they are the work of the devil. > >I understand and basically agree what you're saying. But... many of >what are called "tracking cookies" from marketing organizations are set >by the ads that show up on the screen. Many of 'us' don't like them >reporting how many times we visit some homepage when we are not doing >any business with the company that set the cookie. So my choice is to >keep the cookies from the people I do business with and get rid of as >many others as I can.
I haven't heard of those 'tracking cookies' and don't see how they could work. Of course I realize that an ad provider could track the behaviour of the visitors on all the sites that include their ads, but I don't think that there really are ad-providers that cover so many sites (except Google perhaps) that more than say 20% of the surfing habits of a single person can be followed meaningfully. It's also a very data intensive task with very little to gain. Suppose I would track that you visited the Chipdir and also visit sites about pets, I could then serve a pet ad to you in the Chipdir? Wouldn't that look strange? And would it really make sense to start a database about all the sites that you visited and then at ad delivery time check that database (very quickly) to calculate which ad to show? Wouldn't it be much easier and effective to show pet ads on the site about pets? In the mean time I have some experience with collecting data about the ads on the pages in the Chipdir and on Aufzu.de and I store about 300 bytes per ad that is shown. This results in a datafile of say upto 30 Mbyte per working day or upto 1 Mbyte zipped. Imagine having to store all that (about 7 Gbyte a year) in a database and make it accessible quickly for each new ad that has to be served. I don't think it's very practical. Also compare it to the system of supermarkets issuing those customer loyalty cards: One of the ideas was that when a supermarket noticed that you like a certain product they could warn you via a letter that they were going to have a discounted sale on that product. Have you ever received such a letter? I didn't. It's just much more expensive to print and distribute a lot of individual letters than just shoving a standard folder in each post box, mentioning a lot of discounted products. Already two chains of stores here in the Netherlands have stopped some of the services connected to those cards. The 'Trekpleister' chain of drugstores doesn't give out 'Freebies' points any more and the Edah has also stopped giving out points on their groceries (but it still provides discounts on certain products for people with the card). As regards to businesses you deal with or not. Providing ads is not a core business for many sites on the web and it's understandable that they let other companies handle it. (Google sends me a check of around $200 each month...) Also consider that your browser on your behalf is asking the ad provider to send you an ad, so you're also more or less doing 'business' with him. When your browser encounters <img src="..."> or <script src="..."> it will go and fetch the ad from the ad provider. It doesn't have to do that. By the way, I think that ad provider companies should use browser-session-only cookies as much as possible. Those cookies are removed once the browser is closed again. Anyway, what I basically said was that cookies aren't the terrible thing that some people say they are. They are just a bit of infomation send together with an HTML-page that the browser is supposed to send back to the site at each next HMTL-request so the site can 'recognise' a certain client and adjust it's HTML-pages to that client. Cookies were in fact designed with privacy in mind, because cookies weren't meant to contain some ID about the client with which data about that client could be stored in a database but to contain the actual data about that client, so that the data about the client would be on the client's PC and not in a central database. >> So remember: Cookies are our friends and when you want to bash >> cookies, make sure you know what you're talking about and don't >> just repeat what the popular press is saying about it, because >> they are just repeating what they heard from other unreliable >> colleagues and whenever someone claims that cookies can contain >> virusses, it's clear that he is an idiot (and you should notify >> the chief-editor of the newspaper and you should cancel your >> subscription ;-). > >Agreed. But even unwanted cookies are a minor problem. Recent versions >of printer drivers call 'home' and use up time on your system. >Anti-virus programs obviously do that as well as "Automatic Updates" for >many programs. While these are mostly "good things", they do use up >time and bandwidth, usually without asking you. The side effects of >some "utility" programs can be much more serious. As in the example >where one effectively locked up my sister's computer because it couldn't >find it's own home on the internet but kept on trying. It also popped >up an unwanted survey to be sent to it's owner. It was Spy-Ware and was >depriving my sister of the use of her computer against her will. I >think that is wrong and I took steps to fix it by using the programs >that I mentioned. I agree. I hate scumware too. Software should work on behalf of the user and not on behalve of the company that wrote it. Even Microsoft doesn't seem to understand this lately. BTW. Some scumware changes the site-ID in links to Amazon and Google for example to that of their own, so they get the commission on sales and ad's instead of the site showing the link or ad. It's pure robery. BTW. If someone here is interested in setting up a virtual Amazon store using Amazon's Web Services (AWS) you can copy my script from: http://www.chipdir.nl/amazon/ It's not easy to make much money with it, but I learned a lot about webservices from writing it. (O'Reilly even sent me a couple of free books about the issue, because of that site...) Greetings, Jaap -- Author: Jaap van Ganswijk INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Hosting, San Diego, California -- http://www.fatcity.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
