 A Cookies Monster? |
 |
by Stephen T. Maher
From Steve's Lawyering and the Internet Column in Law Products Magazine, March, 1997.
Are "cookies" an invasion of your privacy or a boon to your
existence? Privacy advocates are upset that this relatively new Internet technology
enables Web sites you visit to monitor your actions on their sites and to store that
information on your hard drive for their future use. Commercial interests claim that much
of the uproar that cookies have caused is due to misinformation. They point to the
benefits that cookies can bring. Sites that can collect information about your preferences
can respond by providing information more tailored to your needs.
What are cookies? Cookies are chunks of information that are passed to your browser by a
server on the Internet with the expectation that they will be stored on your hard drive
and returned to the server when requested. This information is not placed on your hard
drive for general distribution. When a server sets a cookie, the browser will not give up
that cookie data to another server. But the exchange of data does allow the server which
sets cookies to keep track of information about your preferences that is potentially
useful to you and to the server operator.
What is in your Web browser's cookies file? That all depends where your browser has been.
Cookies have been around since Netscape 2.0, and newer browsers have a cookie file
(cookies.txt in a Netscape browser) that contains the cookies stored on your hard drive.
If you want to see when cookies are being passed to your browser, you can set your version
3.0 Netscape browser to alert you every time your browser is asked to accept a cookie. Go
to options, network preferences, protocols and check the box that says to show an alert
before accepting a cookie. This option gives you a choice, every time a cookie is
presented, to accept it or not. Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 3.0 browsers can also
be set to alert for cookies. Go to view, options, click the advanced tab and check the
warn before accepting a cookie option.
If you surf the Web with this option enabled, you will soon see how pervasive cookies are
becoming, especially on more sophisticated sites. You will discover that some sites set no
cookies, while others set many cookies. Banner ads on a site can set their own cookies, so
at a site with several banners you may experience repeated requests to set cookies. All
this occurs without any request when your browser is operating in its default mode. Once
you have made the change that alerts for cookies, you will have the choice to accept or
cancel. If you select cancel, your browser declines the cookie. Some sites will not let
you continue if you decline their cookies. After a while, the alert becomes a big
nuisance, especially at sites that send multiple cookies. It would have been better if
Netscape had designed in other options, such as decline all cookies or decline all cookies
at this site. That was not done, perhaps because Netscape did not want to make it easy to
decline cookies, which have clear commercial value for its server software customers.
What do cookies do? To answer that question, we should start by clarifying what cookies
cannot do. Cookies cannot pass viruses from the server to your hard drive. The information
in the cookie is not a program and is never executed as code. Cookies cannot be used to
get information from your hard drive that the server did not place there. They cannot
capture your e-mail address from your browser, and they cannot steal credit card numbers.
They cannot capture personal information about you, unless you volunteer such information
at a site, for example, in response to an offer of some kind. If you do volunteer personal
information, that information could show up in a cookie and can be used with the
information about you that is collected using cookies.
How do cookies learn your preferences? You can be asked questions at the site, and that
information can be placed in cookies and used as a basis for offering you, or not offering
you, future information. Cookies can be used to track where you travel on a site, or what
choices you make in response to options as you travel through a site. This allows the site
to learn which pages are most popular with visitors, which visitors are repeat visitors
and at which point people leave the site. These facts can help the site make more informed
site design and advertising decisions. Since cookies can also be set by advertising
banners that appear on a site, your travel can be monitored outside a single site through
advertising banners on thousands of sites. This suggests that, at some point, coalitions
of advertisers could work together to keep much more extensive track over individual
activity and preferences on the Web.
The debate about cookies mirrors a larger debate about the risks and rewards of providing
advertisers with detailed information about consumer preferences. There is no question
that placing such information in the hands of advertisers can provide consumers with a
higher level of convenience. For example, password protected sites are likely to become
more common and remembering your various passwords can be a pain. Cookies can be set that
incorporate information that eliminates the need to manually log in. Also, they can
facilitate online ordering by incorporating information from past visits to the site. The
question is whether this increased convenience is worth the price of less privacy about
our usual preferences in our daily lives. Different people will answer that question
different ways. And those who would not be concerned when the intrusion is small might
become concerned as the level of intrusion increases.
As cookies become more pervasive, and as advertisers are able to track more and more of
people's Web preferences, this issue will be driven further to the fore. This suggests
that the philosophical debate will intensify and that practical solutions to consumer
concerns will be developed. The search for solutions often drives software development,
and this has already begun to occur. Software has begun to appear that can automatically
or more selectively block them. Drop by http://www.usual.com for more information about
these developments and for links to Web sites containing further information about
cookies.
Go to Special Features for more information about Cookies.
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