Cookies Are Spyware
Friday, July 15, 2005
Cookies Are Spyware, According to The Wall Street Journal
This piece was first published by M Naples
A Recent Article By the Wall Street Journal States Cookies Are Spyware
So, be sure to disable your cookies, all you WSJ subscribers. That's clearly what the Wall Street Journal would have all of us do. Seriously? Well, maybe.
Walter Mossberg's essay - which ran on Thursday - contains so many inaccuracies that it reminds me of a ruse from a different industry a couple of decades ago. But, perhaps he has an agenda.
Remember the Bottle Bill? The Bottle Bill was created by urban environmentalists and nurtured by the plastics industry because it necessitated returning beverage containers to retailers. In states that passed Bottle Bills, everyone knew that glass and aluminum containers were going to be replaced by unbreakable, larger, easier to handle plastic ones and that more comprehensive recycling programs would suffer. The nine states that have bottle bills today don't have more comprehensive statewide programs since the whole packaging mix was subverted by the 2-liter plastic container.
Enough detail on that. Here's the connection: Almost every major paper in the United States supported Bottle Bills. Most major publishers lobbied hard for them state by state. Of course, this is because newspapers comprise maybe 30 percent of the waste stream while beverage containers comprise maybe 3 percent. Newspapers just wanted to take the spotlight off their own bad litter and waste story. In nine states, they succeeded. Do you know how much post-consumer content is in that copy of the WSJ you read this morning? Not a lot, especially when compared to those beverage containers.
Well, if you read the WSJ online, recycled content is obviously not a concern. But, subscriber dilution is a concern to its publishers. Newspapers as a whole are terribly worried about online, even those newspapers like The Wall Street Journal that have done great things to make money and protect their brand digitally. Talk to enough newspaper publishers about the relationship between their print and online assets and the word you will hear is "cannibalize," because they feel that online readership's erosion.
That's the first thing I thought of when I read Mossberg's piece. Obviously, The Wall Street Journal depends on the cookies it places on its subscribers' hard drives, just as every reputable media company does. Unfortunately, spyware companies can use cookies and IP targeting to locate and target users' hard drives too; so can companies that track users across multiple sites. While tracking users across sites (with full disclosure and without sharing their PII) is okay with me, these same users deserve to know that they're being tracked across media, just as they do in the non-digital world. The fact that they're afraid of it, is our fault as an industry, not theirs as consumers.
The point here is that what companies do with cookies is what we should be talking about, not the cookies themselves. Mossberg seems woefully misinformed - but it's not his fault. His is not the first anti-cookie piece I've seen in a major newspaper, although it's the worst-informed, and it appeared in the most influential outlet. What may be happening here is that newspapers are perhaps posturing toward a role that is somewhat similar to their role in the Bottle Bill debacle 20-some years ago.
Tired of bleeding money online, newspapers are buying marketing companies and many publishers are doing deals with Google, of all companies, to generate more page views and text links. Do you think that newspapers wouldn't rather be the ones managing their own optimization instead of farming it out to the new monolith, and subordinating their brands both nationally and locally?
Well, of course they would - only they haven't figured out how to do so yet. Mossberg wants cookies to be banned because if cookies are gone, all meaningful online measurement is thrown in the air and newspapers are at less of a disadvantage. Or, maybe he thinks - like many others in the print world - that fomenting fears of online media might bring newspapers readers back to traditional newspapers.
Understand that I'm ascribing to this subversive notion because I'm giving him credit for knowing his business. If this agenda were not his intention, then he's just plain wrong and the Journal's publishers should be embarrassed for editorially shooting themselves (and their advertisers) in the foot. Honestly, if this is not his agenda, then it's akin to a major sports league skipping a full season, essentially telling its consumers and sponsors to stick it. I mean, who would be so...so...dense?
What the Debate Should Properly Be About The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) will be hosting a major industry retreat near its headquarters in York Harbor, Maine next week. From their invitation: "Since the debate over spyware has created such an urgent need for those of us in the online industry to identify and support best practices for adware and online advertising..." the best and brightest among our privacy officers and some c-level executives will gather for a two-day workshop to hammer out definitions of what is and is not spyware and adware.
As with any properly drafted restrictive regulation, please note that the NAI workshop will focus on best practices. Cookies aren't the villain here any more than the ads that support our salaries (including yours, Mossberg) or the text links in the galleys of our pages. However, what companies do with cookies, with what's lurking behind those text links can be villainous.
Remember, what users give up to cookies online - in terms of information on them or their behavior - is a small fraction of what they give up to credit card companies they do business with or when they subscribe to The Wall Street Journal newspaper.
What matters here is not the technology, but the behavior. It's no more or less true in online media than it is in traditional media. Next time the Journal's parent, Dow Jones, sells a subscriber db-segment to one of its direct mail partners, that behavior must be above-board. It will be enabled by technology not unlike cookies. Traditional media companies sell these records every day. What matters is how they sell them and to whom - the behavior, not the technology.
Let's face the fact that, as an industry, we've failed to make it clear to consumers that cookies are not the problem. Now - it seems - we can add newspapers themselves to our list of opponents, joining marketers of spyware removal products, who started this mess in the first place by identifying all cookies as spyware. I hope I'm wrong. But, as much as I trust the beleaguered cookies on my hard drive, these days I always suspect an agenda from anyone turning cookies into the villain.
The best chance this industry has for combating the sort of uniformed fears that Mossberg's piece will nurture gathers in York Harbor, Maine next week. If you're not familiar with what the NAI is up to, ask the top companies in our industry who participate. More importantly, ask the Congressional committees writing the laws we're all going to be following soon. When it comes to these matters, they look to the NAI too.
Cookies choke search engine spiders !
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