Commerce Bank (fwd)

[Mike Coleman]

Jeffrey Watts <watts at jayhawks.net> writes:
> On Wed, 17 May 2000, Gene  E. Dascher wrote:
> > For the most part, I think that cookies are evil,
> > so this is a good way to discourage them.

> Man, you are one paranoid puppy.  Cookies are necessary.  Real business on
> the 'Net is impossible without the ability for a remote site to set a
> session key.

Maybe you're not paranoid enough.  Cookies do have the potential to provide
useful functionality; that's why they were invented.

Unfortunately, scumbags like DoubleClick have figured out how to use this same
functionality for vicious purposes.  If you don't take steps to protect
yourself, they can track your activities across a wide set of web sites.
There was also an announcement recently that they were going to correlate this
web activity against some marketing database of real names and addresses, etc.
(I'm not sure what the status of that plan is.)

If you think privacy is important, now is definitely the time to do something
about it.  If we don't speak up, Congress may eventually make it *illegal* to
disable cookies.  (If this strains credulity, take a close look at the DMCA.)

I've been mentioning to people in private conversions over the last few years
that they can expect personal privacy to completely disappear over the next
20-50 years.  By "completely", I mean, for example, that you won't even be
able to go to the can without being observed by more or less whomever wants
to, probably in real time, etc.  This might sound crazy, but it sounds a lot
less crazy than it did five years ago.

--Mike

-- 
Any sufficiently adverse technology is indistinguishable from Microsoft.