Internet users massacre cookies

Found on The Inquirer on Tuesday, 15 March 2005
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Market research outfit Jupiter Research has published a study that shows more than half of Internet users delete cookies. This seriously undermines website operators' ability to measure consumer behaviour on their sites, the report said.

Eric Peterson, analyst for Jupiter Research, said that most users feared that if they took cookies from a site they will have their personal details blasted all over the interweb or get sucked into spam campaigns.

Peterson said such moves were making it impossible for companies to do any monitoring of customers and the problems caused by cookie deletion were going to get worse.

He said that website operators need to look for new technologies to solve the problem. He thinks more companies will start using Flash to track consumers each time they visit a site.

And I'm one of them. I don't want websites to greet me when I come back, or adjust to my browsing habits. There are a few cases where I allow cookies, like for automatic logins on some boards. Switching to Flash wouldn't help. Most of those Flash files are just eyecandy anyway, and not really important in 99% of all cases; like Javascript. If more webmasters would switch from cookies to Flash for tracking users, I'd simply turn off Flash in my proxy.