RE: cookie-free

Allan is certainly on target. Like with guns, cookies - in themselves - are
not the problem, They have been made to appear as the problem by certain
users (or should I have said, abusers). But, cookies or not, they are not a
good solution, either.

If you want all your site visitors to be included you need to handle your
information acquisition and flow on the server side. Cookies, and Java, can
be (and frequently are) disabled in the browser. If you handle your
information acquisition and flow on the server side it cannot be disabled.
Yes, it can be a pain - for a while - but  'learning curves' are temporary.

Got to roll with the punches, guys, and we're not going to win the cookie
war.

Bob Masters
Client Relations

mailto:Admin(at)Activizers.com
http://www.Activizers.com
Helping prospective friends plan
and implement a successful approach
to doing business on the World Wide Web.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hwg-business(at)hwg.org [mailto:owner-hwg-business(at)hwg.org]On
Behalf Of Allan Hunt-Badiner
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 16:16
To: hwg-business(at)hwg.org
Subject: cookie-free


i certainly agree that cookies are not inherently the problem, and they
can be very useful.  unfortunately, they are at the center of a huge and
growing storm over privacy thanks to their abuse by ad agencies.  with
cookie-synchronization over a wide network, people who have their
cookies turned on are likely to be tracked and profiled as they move
around the web, and this info may well be matched with personal info
(despite DoubleClicks recent PR statements) and sold to an endless
string of third parties.  for the most part people don't know what
cookies are and when they hear they are being tracked around the web
(they are) they don't like it.

so while the problem is not cookies, there is a problem with sites that
require their use to have functionality, since a growing number of
users will likely be disabling them. it probably unrealistic to expect
users to be toggling between accepting and declining cookies and
editing their cookie files... this is why the media, including
Bllomberg, CNNfn, and many others are showing people (about 5 times a
day) how to disable them.

btw- you don't need cookies to make purchases on Amazon, or most of the
bigger professional ecommerce sites, and while i lament the current
hatred of cookies (because they were such a nifty tool) i think it is
poor planning, and perhaps even poor net etiquette to require their
use at this point.

--Allan

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