decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
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.
It doesn't matter why they need tracking - it's MY privacy
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 09 2013 @ 03:33 PM EDT

My privacy is mine to decide - not theirs because their business model needs it.

If I walk into a brick-n-mortar store and they request my personal information:

    I politely decline!
They do not require my personal information for any reason when I am paying cash for the product I want.

If anyone ever insists on acquiring my personal information for a cash sale - I will leave the product at the counter, walk out, and never go back.

Other customers may feel differently. That's their choice as it's their privacy they are deciding on.

Old style print newspaper and magazine advertising typically relied on having a subscriber list to provide equivalent "tracking" data.
To what extent was that tracking data?
    Was it just a name and address?
    Did it include age?
    Did it include multiple contact info?
    Does National Geographic (to which I have a subscription) know whether or not I have a subscription to Golf Canada Magazine?
    Does Neimann Marcus know whether or not I have a subscription to both National Geographic and Golf Canada Magazine?
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.
This may be true - but it's also still just guessing. It's not a direct link of the exact information to a specific individual.
Without cookie tracking, then all publishers have to show advertisers is geo-location data.
Ok... so their guessing is now on a much wider scale then a city block.... too bad.
now television and radio are going broke
That's what happens with outdated business models. One only need to consider the horse-n-buggy compared to the automobile for a clear example of this. Just because they have an outdated business model does not grant them carte blanche access to my personal information. It also doesn't grant them a "right" to stay in business just because they have been in successful business for a time.
In the end, I suspect that the result of more "cookie privacy" will be far more invasive tracking in far less transparent ways.
The proper solution to that problem is:
    Continued vigilance
not:
    accepting forfeiture of privacy
Final note: I purchase tv shows to watch at home. BlueRay if I can get them, DVD otherwise. I purchase both old tv shows that I still enjoy (like Gilligan's Island) and new tv shows that have caught my interest (like Grimm).

As a result, while TV networks may very well go out of business because their model no longer works (on people like myself) those that produce the tv shows are still making a profit. So the TV networks go out of business - too bad. Their business model is not a necessity and there's plenty of alternatives now. So if they don't want to stay competitive in acceptable ways, and they want to claim "privacy must be done away with if we are to stay in business" then I say:

    Let them go out of business!
I stopped watching tv 6 years ago when I realized the 3-hour movie slot was 1.5 hour movie (chopped down from 2 hours of course) and 1.5 hour commercial. That is a totally unacceptable portion of commercial time to me.

RAS

[ 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 @ 04:23 PM EDT
An astute advertizing company would do the spadework to figure out a profile for those who run with cookies off. My guess is that they are an excellent market for tech toys. (Anyone want a sonic screwdriver? New or old version. ;-) The spadework incidentally is what every advertizing client should be doing anyway. For example, have click-throughs from different ads go to different addresses and track purchases from there. An add with lots of click-throughs and no associated sales is a very questionable investment. Anyway, the merchant wants/needs this information anyway. The advertizing company want/needs the same information, but to price things to maximize their revenue from the merchant. So how can the advertiser get this information for itself? Place its own ads, for some line of products that doesn't really compete with their big clients.

But all that is too much like work, compared to placing cookies.

Another choice works something like this. A credit card company explains what it is doing, and creates a cookie on your computer that vendors can read--but not edit. The credit card company vets vendors before allowing them access, and suspends access for vendors who create too many complaints or returns. That way the credit card provides you with a service (vetting vendors) and a service to the vendor: Both a lower default rate, and some market information aggregated to provide you with privacy.

Writing and testing the software? At most a couple of weeks. Changing market expectations? Years. But I would love not to have to enter credit card information at dozens of vendors. (The vendor gets a transaction ID, which is all it needs to see. For physical deliveries, though, the vendor will still need a shipping address.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )