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The Man Who Turned Off Cookies In Firefox Doesn't Care If It Hurts Advertisers | 206 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The Man Who Turned Off Cookies
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 08 2013 @ 09:49 PM EDT
Presumably there are too many people using dynamic IP nrs, or
working thru proxies, to make serverside tracking viable. Now some
e-commerce sites require the cookie to be active throughout a
transaction, which is why I don't turn cookies OFF. I do run a
script that purges cookies at logout. I have a shortcut to the script
so I can run it at any time at will. And those sites that want
to keep track of me do it on their own servers, requiring me to
login (or create a new account) for each new transaction.

It seems highly unlikely the trackers are ever going to agree to
any mechanism that allows a user to opt out, so it's up to users
to either deny or purge their own cookies. It shouldn't be
beyond the wit of man to rustle up a widget or browser plugin
or somesuch, that could perform such a cookie purge on closing
the browser window. So the argument comes back to the present
one, should it be shipped by default with browsers, on or off?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The Man Who Turned Off Cookies In Firefox Doesn't Care If It Hurts Advertisers
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 09 2013 @ 12:44 PM EDT

The way that web based advertising works is that the price that advertisers pay for an individual ad depends on what is known about the person who will receive it. Advertisers can select their ads to be seen only by people who fit profiles that they specify. These advertising "slots" are then auctioned off to the highest bidder in real time.

If there is no tracking data on a viewer, then they typically get fed what are called "remnant ads". These are low priced ads for things like fad diets that don't bring in much revenue, but they fill otherwise vacant space. Web sites that depend on advertising want to sell as many high priced ads as possible, and minimize the proportion of "remnant ads". To do that, they need tracking.

Moving to an advertising model that doesn't use tracking would mean a complete restructuring of the advertising industry. Old style print newspaper and magazine advertising typically relied on having a subscriber list to provide equivalent "tracking" data. Publishers would find out all sorts of information about their subscribers based on things such as their postal codes. For example, they would get the property tax assessment values, census data, etc., and use that to form income, age, and family size profiles of their customers which they would use to base the cost of their ad slots when dealing with advertisers. All of this data would be audited by third parties to prevent publishers from creating bogus "demographics".

Web media doesn't usually have "subscribers", because you don't get web pages "delivered" to you by the publisher. Instead, you go out and "pick it up" anonymously yourself (much like old style news stand sales). Without cookie tracking, then all publishers have to show advertisers is geo-location data. The price they can charge is much lower.

Television and radio ads have a similar problem of not really knowing who their audience is. But television and radio used to have the advantage of limited competition, since there were only a limited number of frequencies available, and because the high cost of transmitters also created barriers to market entry. The proliferation of cable and satellite (and now Internet) distribution though has removed those barriers, and now television and radio are going broke.

Without cookie tracking, I suspect what will happen is that popular web sites will either erect pay-walls, or they will require free registration. Each web site will then find ways of collecting information about their viewers in the same way that print media did. Big media conglomerates will be able to aggregate more information about their viewers, which in turn will tend to drive ownership of big sites into fewer and fewer hands. In the end, I suspect that the result of more "cookie privacy" will be far more invasive tracking in far less transparent ways.

Having said that, I browse with cookies turned off. After all, I don't need perfect anonymity. I just need to be more anonymous than the average person so that advertisers don't bother with me.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The Man Who Turned Off Cookies In Firefox Doesn't Care If It Hurts Advertisers
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 14 2013 @ 09:56 AM EDT
That link doesn't show any article text if you protect your privacy and security
by turning off JavaScript...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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