Paranoid about Cookies...

[Jeffrey Watts]

On Thu, 18 May 2000, Gene  E. Dascher wrote:

> 	I don't think that it will "sprout horns" etc., BUT like Mike
> Coleman mentioned, there are businesses who take unfair advantage of
> the cookie and use it to see where you have been, etc. WITHOUT YOUR
> CONSENT.

The DoubleClick scheme was to simply track _where_ you viewed its ads.  
It never had the ability to see "where you have been", it simply could
tell which of its member sites you were visiting.  The idea would be to
tailor advertisement towards your individual tastes (already happens), and
to do market research.  There are certain privacy concerns -- I personally
don't really care for some ad agency tracking my tastes, but it's not
exactly high treason.

Heck, one could look at my web logs as an example of "web tracking".  I
could, based upon an IP address, build a database of where each IP went,
and how many times.  Perhaps I could use this information to determine
which people were Chris Bell groupies by looking at how many times a
particular IP address read one of his posts in the archives.  Is that
illegal?  No.  Not at all.  You came to _my_ site.  Is it ethical?  
Dunno.  I don't think people have really figured that out yet.

I suppose the way I look at it is this -- on the one hand _everyone_ hates
Spam (unsolicited commercial email).  Why?  They rarely are about anything
you care about, they're wasteful of resources and time, and they're
invasive.

So what would we want advertisers to do?  Well, we'd want them to not
advertise stuff to us that we don't care about.  We'd want it to be
voluntary (going to a free site that is ad-supported, or going to an
online store), and we'd want it to not suck up bandwidth.

Well, to be honest, targeted banner ads on commercial sites is a really
great idea that addresses these concerns.  I think there are some privacy
issues, but I think those can be worked out.

> Do any of you use the program Go-Zilla for Winblows?  (It is a
> Download Scheduling program for those of you who do not know.)  Here
> where I work, we have a pretty tight firewall.  One of the sysadmins
> noticed that data was being passed to a blocked URL, so he
> investigated.  The requests were coming from a cubemate of mine who
> had Go-Zilla installed on his PC at work.  Apparently, Go-Zilla has a
> TSR that monitors every website that you visit and bounces that
> information to another URL. Maybe it was in the License agreement, and
> maybe it wasn't, but I think that is a HUGE violation of a user's
> privacy.  I haven't seen ANYTHING in the program that will allow you
> to turn that "feature" off.

What does _any_ of this have to do with cookies, a web browser, or Linux?  
You seem to be using this example as evidence for your beliefs, but this
example is not germane in any way to this discussion.

J.

o-----------------------------------o
| Jeffrey Watts                     |
| watts at jayhawks.net         o-----------------------------------------o
| Systems Programmer         | "...I'm not one of those who think Bill |
| Network Systems Management |  Gates is the devil.  I simply suspect  |
| Sprint Communications      |  that if Microsoft ever met up with the |
o----------------------------|  devil, it wouldn't need an             |
                             |  interpreter."                          |
                             |  -- Nick Petreley                       |
                             o-----------------------------------------o