Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Monday, November 30, 2009
Cookies, Of The Online Persuasion 3:19 p.m.
I had to answer a couple of questions about cookies for a continuing studies certificate I'm taking in Web Intelligence. The whole exercise was so interesting that I thought I'd share.
Are you willing to give up your "privacy" in order to have easier-to-use websites?
The author’s use of quotation marks implies that even he/she is unsure as to whether veritable privacy, or “privacy” as it is commonly understood, is at stake. The question presumes that first-party cookies (the tool employed to make websites easier to use) require you to give up some kind of privacy.
Wikipedia (although not always the most reliable, by far my favourite website) describes privacy as the “ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively”.
Do cookies threaten a user’s ability to selectively reveal themselves? I think third-party cookies do, but I believe that “giving up privacy in order to have easier-to-use websites” is a question about first-party cookies, since third-party cookies are most often used by advertisers to track visitor behaviour across a broad portfolio of websites and not to improve a particular website’s ease-of-use.
To explore a different angle of the debate, I don’t necessarily think first-party cookies require us to give up privacy. I should mention that I understand first-party cookies to be tied to a single domain. It occurred to me that multinational conglomerates might use cookies to track user behaviour across multiple sites and brands; I would consider those to be third-party cookies. Although I don’t think the distinction will be valid for long.
The issue of health care related web interactions is an interesting one. If I visit a disease-specific information site and provide my email address in order to receive news alerts, I am privately and consciously transacting with the operator of the website for the purpose of receiving communications. If my email address, associated with that disease-specific site, is eventually the basis for an insurance provider to deny me coverage, I think it’s fair to say that my privacy has been violated and that I (sure as hell) didn’t sign up for that.
Similarly, in the case of cookies, if I visit a site and my settings are such that a cookie is downloaded to my machine, I am choosing to reveal a discrete amount of information to the website operator. Data is being created about a private interaction, between me and the operator’s site. But I don’t agree to be eventually denied insurance coverage because the site’s cookie history was sold to an insurance company.
Just like walking down the street, I’ve never thought that interacting with a website was an entirely anonymous activity. The web is a community of users, gathered behind websites, and interactions with users, people create information. If you want to wear a paper bag, you’re welcome to change your privacy settings, but people are still going to see you walking down the street (i.e. analytics solutions will recognize your location, browser settings, length of visit, pages viewed).
I may be rambling. To wrap it up, I don’t think that we have to give up privacy to have easier-to-use websites. But I think that we need to have more clearly articulated privacy standards where the onus is on websites to comply and not on users to review lengthy and complex privacy policy statements. But that’s a question for another day.
Are you willing to give up your "privacy" so that the ads you see on websites are likely to be more relevant to you?
Yes, but only because it’s useful for work: to see what kind of targeted campaigns people are running. I subscribe to the widespread marketing industry hypocrisy that loathes being on the receiving end of a sales pitch, however relevant.
Are you willing to give up your "privacy" in order to have easier-to-use websites?
The author’s use of quotation marks implies that even he/she is unsure as to whether veritable privacy, or “privacy” as it is commonly understood, is at stake. The question presumes that first-party cookies (the tool employed to make websites easier to use) require you to give up some kind of privacy.
Wikipedia (although not always the most reliable, by far my favourite website) describes privacy as the “ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively”.
Do cookies threaten a user’s ability to selectively reveal themselves? I think third-party cookies do, but I believe that “giving up privacy in order to have easier-to-use websites” is a question about first-party cookies, since third-party cookies are most often used by advertisers to track visitor behaviour across a broad portfolio of websites and not to improve a particular website’s ease-of-use.
To explore a different angle of the debate, I don’t necessarily think first-party cookies require us to give up privacy. I should mention that I understand first-party cookies to be tied to a single domain. It occurred to me that multinational conglomerates might use cookies to track user behaviour across multiple sites and brands; I would consider those to be third-party cookies. Although I don’t think the distinction will be valid for long.
The issue of health care related web interactions is an interesting one. If I visit a disease-specific information site and provide my email address in order to receive news alerts, I am privately and consciously transacting with the operator of the website for the purpose of receiving communications. If my email address, associated with that disease-specific site, is eventually the basis for an insurance provider to deny me coverage, I think it’s fair to say that my privacy has been violated and that I (sure as hell) didn’t sign up for that.
Similarly, in the case of cookies, if I visit a site and my settings are such that a cookie is downloaded to my machine, I am choosing to reveal a discrete amount of information to the website operator. Data is being created about a private interaction, between me and the operator’s site. But I don’t agree to be eventually denied insurance coverage because the site’s cookie history was sold to an insurance company.
Just like walking down the street, I’ve never thought that interacting with a website was an entirely anonymous activity. The web is a community of users, gathered behind websites, and interactions with users, people create information. If you want to wear a paper bag, you’re welcome to change your privacy settings, but people are still going to see you walking down the street (i.e. analytics solutions will recognize your location, browser settings, length of visit, pages viewed).
I may be rambling. To wrap it up, I don’t think that we have to give up privacy to have easier-to-use websites. But I think that we need to have more clearly articulated privacy standards where the onus is on websites to comply and not on users to review lengthy and complex privacy policy statements. But that’s a question for another day.
Are you willing to give up your "privacy" so that the ads you see on websites are likely to be more relevant to you?
Yes, but only because it’s useful for work: to see what kind of targeted campaigns people are running. I subscribe to the widespread marketing industry hypocrisy that loathes being on the receiving end of a sales pitch, however relevant.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Thursday, June 29, 2006
a fountain of sugary fun 10:49 p.m.
david letterman in putting mentos candies in big bottles of diet coke. i'm entertained, and nearly distracted. now if only i could stop listening to wonderall and get on with it.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Friday, June 09, 2006
googler interrupted 8:55 a.m.
i've been having a serious amount of trouble with google's beta apps recently: gtalk is blinking, gmail is blinking, blogger is practically blind...the desktop app, though cool, has been unreliable and a monster drain on my poor comp's day to day. then, as though the frustration of trial software weren't enough, someone close to me introduced the possibility that google isn't the innocent novelty i would have it be. stuff about caches, metabots, world domination. as it turns out they're keeping everything on a server somewhere, so that when i search google, i'm really searching google's stash of info, not the web. i must've been living under a rock because everyone seems to know this but me. sitting on my father's 1973 corduroy ikea sofa (which miraculously still holds its shape) i experiment with the idea that google is god. it knows everything about my life, is everpresent, omnipowerful, mysterious. it will most definitely outlive me. maybe i should start praying to google. maybe i should ask it for a job.
