| With the relatively recent influx of online shopping, web sites functioning as giant, interactive mail-order catalogs have sprung up everywhere. Before long, developers found that in order to keep their sites running and their customers happy, they needed a way to track individual customers’ selections and preferences and not bog down the system. The solution that eventually presented itself was cookies. According to the "Help" section of the popular browser Netscape Navigator, cookies are tidbits of information stored in the user’s hard drive, placed there by the servers of the web pages visited. The cookies keep information about the user and relate it to the servers so that the next time the user visits that particular page, they are identified and certain aspects of the page can be customized. The situation is similar to that of one parading around the web with an identification card stuck to his forehead.
Cookies can be beneficial for sites that require logging in to individual accounts, such as personal start pages or online shopping carts. Personalized headlines, news genres, stock quotes, and sports scores are all made possible by the use of cookies. They store information that is still accessible over long periods of time, so that a customer is never "forgotten." A customer could place a few books and CDs into a virtual shopping cart, leave, and return years later to find the items untouched in the cart, along with any unpaid bills. Cookies have made personalization of the internet a reality, making it ever more convenient for online consumers.
Information such as user names and passwords is often stored on cookies, meaning anyone with access to them can easily gain access to that user’s account. Cookies may also be storing the e-mail addresses of users as well as the sites they’ve visited, making them an open target for advertisers. Most browsers accept cookies without the user’s knowledge, automatically storing them under a file name such as cookies.txt or magicCookies. There, these files lie dormant until the page is revisited and the cookie "fills in the blanks" about the page visitor to bring up the appropriate advertisement and/or start page.
Use of cookies has spread to marketing strategies, tracking which and how frequently sites are visited. Relevant advertisements can then be targeted towards specific users. Those who indulge in the occasional online game will more often than not find advertisements for online casinos flashing across their screens, thanks to the cookie that revealed their closet passion for blackjack to marketing agencies. This method of customizing advertisements has generated some controversy among many people who consider privacy and anonymity some of the internet’s most valuable features. One particular agency under fire is DoubleClick, who was recently accused of violating privacy rights by linking consumers’ buying habits with names and addresses in a massive marketing database. They were slapped with a lawsuit claiming that they gathered and sold personal information about web surfers without their knowledge. Although DoubleClick claimed they did not cross-reference their tracking data with names and addresses, many consumers were decidedly shaken by the possibility of such an occurrence and began questioning the ethics of such marketing strategies.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has proposed a possible solution to the uproar over the distribution of personal information. They seek to implement a program called eTrust, in which sites are audited for the use of any personal information gathered, and display an eTrust logo to demonstrate their compliance with the policy.
In today’s demand for convenience and customization, our basic rights to privacy seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle. Cookie acceptance can be disabled, but the question falls on whether or not people are willing to forgo convenience for anonymity. Many are fooled into submitting personal information to various surveys in order to help the site "better serve their needs," but in many cases, personalization of a site is just a data tracker in disguise. What benefits does the user gain by simply seeing his name up in a corner whenever he visits a particular web site? Targeted advertising is not the problem; rather, it is the agencies that sell off the confidential information of private citizens.
Bibliography
Cookie Central.
http://www.cookiecentral.com/cm002.htm
Garfinkel, Simson. Browser Cookies are Persistent, Not Necessarily Evil, Wired Magazine, December 11, 1996.
http://www.wired.com/news/topstories/0,1287,887,00.html
Hawkins, Dana. Tracking the Web of Data You Weave, US News, October 2, 2000.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/001002/nycu/privacy3.htm
Netscape Navigator.
http://help.netscape.com/kb/consumer/19970226-2.html
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