You might be looking at this article and wondering why cookies caused such a massive uproar in the media. The technology itself is benign. They are just small text files stored on your hard drive. They provide useful capabilities like keeping you logged into accounts or remembering your shopping cart.
But two specific issues turned a convenient tool into a privacy nightmare.
Data Selling and Precise Targeting
The first issue is old news. It has plagued consumers for decades. Think about buying something from a traditional mail-order catalog. The company gets your name, address, and phone number. They also know what you bought. They can sell that information to other companies who want to sell you similar products. This fuel makes telemarketing and junk mail possible.
On the web, tracking is far more aggressive. A site tracks not only your purchases but also the pages you read and the ads you click. If you buy something and enter your details, the site knows much more about you than a catalog ever could. This allows for extremely precise targeting. That precision makes people uncomfortable.
Different sites have different policies. For instance, HowStuffWorks maintains a strict privacy policy. We do not sell or share personal information with third parties unless you specifically opt-in to an email program. We do aggregate data. If a reporter asks how many visitors we have, we pull statistics from the database. We do not share individual identities.
Cross-Site Profiling and Infrastructure Risks
The second issue is unique to the Internet. It involves infrastructure providers who can create cookies visible across multiple sites. DoubleClick is the most famous example. Many companies use DoubleClick to serve banner ads.
DoubleClick places tiny 1×1 pixel GIF files on these sites. These files allow DoubleClick to load cookies on your machine. It then tracks your movements across the web. It can see search strings you type into engines due to how some systems are implemented. This is not necessarily sinister intent. It is just how the infrastructure works.
Because it gathers so much data from multiple sources, DoubleClick forms rich profiles. These profiles remain anonymous but they are detailed. Then DoubleClick went further. It acquired a company and threatened to link these anonymous profiles to name and address information. It threatened to personalize the data. Then it would sell it.
That looked like spying to most people. That caused the uproar. Companies like DoubleClick are in a unique position because they serve ads on so many sites. Cross-site profiling is not a capability available to individual sites because cookies are site-specific. Only these infrastructure giants can stitch together data from across the web.
Understanding the Scope
For more information on internet cookies and related topics, check out the links below.
Related HowStuffWorks Articles
- How Web Servers Work
- How Internet Infrastructure Works
- How Caching Works
- How Operating Systems Work
- How Hard Disks Work
- How Affiliate Programs Work
- How E-commerce Works
- How Amazon Works
- How Spyware Works
- How Trojan Horses Work
More Great Links
- Netscape: Persistent Client State: HTTP Cookies
- Webopedia: Cookie
- CookieCentral: Cookie FAQ
- Netscape: Cookies – what they are and how they work
- Netscape: Privacy
