Maybe this news will help kill cookies used as market research spyware. Edited Press release below.
ACCURATE WEB SITE VISITOR MEASUREMENT CRIPPLED BY COOKIE BLOCKING AND DELETION,
JUPITERRESEARCH FINDS(New York, NY – March 14, 2005) —
Jupitermedia Corporation’s (Nasdaq: JUPM)JupiterResearch announced today that, according to its recently released report “Measuring Unique Visitors: Addressing the Dramatic Decline in the Accuracy of Cookie-Based Measurement,” in 2004 58% of online users have deleted “cookies”, which are small files often deposited on their computers by Web sites they visit. Tracking cookies is a principal means Web site operators use to track visitors, personalize their sites, and account for the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and Web site enhancements. If users delete cookies, accurate long-term measurement of consumer behavior on the site is severely compromised. If users block cookies, accurate short-term measurement is compromised, relegating increasing numbers of Web visitors to “anonymous” status.The report found that as many as 39% of online users may be deleting cookies from their primary computer monthly, undermining the usefulness of cookie-based measurement and leaving many site operators flying blind.
“Given the number of sites and applications that depend heavily on cookies for accuracy and functionality, the lack of this data represents significant risk for many companies,” says Eric T. Peterson, Analyst at JupiterResearch. “Because personalization, tracking and targeting solutions require cookies to identify Web visitors over multiple sessions, the accuracy of these solutions has become highly suspect, especially over longer periods of time,” added Peterson.Privacy and security concerns on the part of online users are responsible for the cookie-deletion behavior that JupiterResearch has found. According to a recent consumer survey cited in the report, 52% of online users indicate a strong interest in stories and articles about Internet security and privacy, while 38% of online users believe that cookies are an invasion of their security and privacy online and 44% of online users believe that deleting or blocking cookies will protect them.
The JupiterResearch report provides advice to site operators for how to cope with the decline in accuracy of visitor measurement and predicts that Web analytics vendors will adapt their tools in the face of a consumer landscape that makes established measurement practices unreliable.
Hey John,
It looks like one of your “strike” tags was not closed properly. Your whole site is striken now.
I enjoy your blog and it inspired me in creating one. I also got WordPress as per your recommendation. I’m very happy with it.
The problem is I’ve stopped checking the site in IE — which is totally crummy especially for the WP blog layout I use.. There are a few differences and that was one of them. Fixed it. Thanks.
I have had same problem with a “small” tag. The problem was showing in IE but not in Firefox.
Going to many CSS enhancement sites, you can find that fancy CSS design is great but very browser dependent, which is not cool.
I always set browsers to force session cookies and install the gorilla hosts file. I administer a small (7 computers) IE-Free LAN so I guess they don’t really like me.
I can just imagine what they’ll think of me when I set the router to pipe most of the HTTP traffic through Privoxy.
…and I too, chose WordPress thanks to your review. I’ve even replaced my main site’s updates listings with a WordPress category. (But it took me over an hour no thanks to a PHP embedding bug.)
“The report found that as many as 39% of online users may be deleting cookies from their primary computer monthly,”
Um.. what about all the people whose cookies are deleted every single time they close their browser?
Glad to see John that you don’t use IE either.
I hope no one paid for that research. All I could think of is, “well, duh!”
Cookies are like telemarketing or some other brainstorm. I like the idea of digital certificates. Cookies don’t offer any additional trust or security. That is why people delete them. Who’s idea were cookies?
———————————————————————————————–
MYSTICAL COOKIES
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/i-034.shtml
PROBLEM: Cookies are short pieces of data used by web servers to help
identify web users. The popular concepts and rumors about what a
cookie can do has reached almost mystical proportions,
frightening users and worrying their managers.
PLATFORM: Any platform that can use a modern web browser.
DAMAGE: No damage to files or systems. Cookies are only used to identify
a web user though they may be used to track a user’s browsing
habits.
SOLUTION: No files are destroyed or compromised by cookies, but if
you are concerned about being identified or about having your web
browsing traced through the use of a cookie, set your browser to
not accept cookies or use one of the new cookie blocking
packages. Note that blocking all cookies prevents some online
services from working. Also, preventing your browser from
accepting cookies does not make you an anonymous user, it just
makes it more difficult to track your usage.
———————————————————————————————–
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE ONLY ONES WHO FEED ON COOKIES ARE SPAMMERS OR IDIOTS. BASICALLY YOU DON’T NEED COOKIES AND COOKIES DON’T DO ANYTHING FOR THE WEB USER. PEOPLE SIT AROUND AND WRITE COOKIES. NEXT IT WILL BE A VIRUS SPREADING AS A COOKIE. I’D SAY KILLING COOKIES IS A GREAT IDEA. I DON’T NEED COOKIES AND THEY ARE DUMB.
Hi
It’s still redacted in IE and also in Firefox
Not on my system and I hear nobody else complaining..Just the few lines that are meant to be crossed out are crossed out. Before it was the entire blog. Is that what you are seeing?
Who is actually associating anonymous cookies with personal user data?
IMHO, cookies make Amazon.com possible, among many other customized sites. They also makes a web developer’s job easier, though session management (and the choice between cookies and encoding a session param in the URL) is mostly automatic these days.
If Spybot SD and others want to delete cookies on the side for me, fine, but I don’t see the point in getting worked up until a company actually starts putting the pieces together.
Until then all they know is someone likes to surf porn and Dvorak.org. No surprise there.
Cookies help maintain session information which is critical in the stateless http protocol. Without some way of verifiying the identity of a user, we would have no online stores. I remember the first years of the web in the pre-graphical days. There weren’t any online stores. They handled everything through (unsecure) email. The critical invention of secure sockets and the session tracking cookie made the idea of doing business online possible. Sure, you could record the session key in the url, but that does not carry between browser sessions.
It is, however, probably better to set one’s browser up to whitelist sites you want tracking you (like your own weblog) whilst blocking everything else by default.
Also, cookies save me time by filling in the comment form here, since WordPress by default records such info.
I use a cookie management program and only accept cookies from a company that I intend to continue to do business with. With a managment program, you’d be surprised at the number of sites that try to store cookies on your machine. I get to see them all and decide which ones I want to accept in the future and which ones to permanently reject without any further prompts.
There are companies like Lowe’s and Best Buy that I won’t ever visit on the web because they won’t let me in unless I accept their cookies. To me, that is equivalent to a brick and mortar store asking me to show some form of ID before they will let me look in their window. BAD business decision…