Contention Over Cookies

BROWSER COOKIES MAY HAVE outlived their usefulness as Web metrics tools. And their high deletion rates should lead Internet engineers to create new technologies that might be less objectionable to consumers.

So said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, speaking last month at Ad:Tech New York.

But he didn't get much agreement.

Trevor Hughes, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative, countered that consumers already have a great deal of control over cookie downloads thanks to their browser settings — most of which they don't use.

And those new technologies? Hughes worried that some would be “more surreptitious, less transparent.” One is persistent identifiable elements (PIEs). They can restore deleted cookies and can't be easily removed.

Cookies — small data files embedded in Web pages and downloaded automatically to visitors' browsers — are used for a number of tasks, from personalizing Internet content and enabling Web shopping carts to delivering ads based on browser behavior. They also help marketers measure the number of ad impressions and control their frequency.

High cookie deletion rates are a major problem for advertisers, said Tom Hespos, president of marketing communications firm Underscore Marketing. If cookies no longer are usable, “all the accountability that, as an advertising guy, I've sold to my clients goes away,” he said.

Should consumers be notified before a cookie is downloaded?

Hughes argued that this is “neither appropriate nor helpful to the consumer.” Readers don't want to make a decision about each of the 17 cookies downloaded when they visit The New York Times' home page, he added. “If they want to know, we should provide them with tools to get that information and control it. But we shouldn't confront them every time they come to a Web site,” he said.

Esther Dyson, editor of the Release 1.0 technology report, said Internet industries with the most to lose if cookies disappear are “doing a rotten job” of explaining their value to consumers. That gives anti-spyware manufacturers an opportunity to fill the information vacuum with fear-mongering self-promotion.

“Just the way advertisers use product placement, I think maybe we ought to consider ‘concept placement’ — perhaps have the Desperate Housewives do something with cookies,” she said.