Cookie firms vs anti-Spyware bill
p2pnet.net News:- For the hell of it, one of these days, turn your cookie controls off and set them to manual. Then count just how many cookies the average commercial – and plenty of non-commercial, for that matter – sites throw at you.
Some web pages won’t even let you in unless you ‘agree’ to let them place a cookie – a small piece of text – on your hard drive. And companies make money by using cookies to find out as much as they can to ‘profile’ you – whether you like it or not. Then they sell these extremely valuable data to anyone who cares to pay them.
Now, “Lawmakers are considering changes to an anti-spyware bill to make sure ‘cookies’ are not on its list of unlawful technologies, in a potential boon to online marketer,” says ZDNet.
“A spokeswoman for House member Mary Bono, the California Republican who drafted the revised Spy Act in January, said that concerns have been raised over language in the bill targeting cookies, which are tiny tags used by sites to keep track of passwords or analyze Internet behavior.”
The exemption as written didn’t include third-party cookies, “and that’s a huge swath of industry that deals with sophisticated online advertising, analytics and some e-commerce,” CNET has Trevor Hughes, a spokesman for the Network Advertising Initiative, which represents online ad networks such as Advertising.com and DoubleClick, saying
“It was and remains a real concern, until we see better language.”
Third party cookies are cookies that end up on your system without you ever having visited them.
In 2000, Microsoft released a “privacy enhancement” beta for Internet Explorer 5.5 to give users greater control over cookies.
Hot target
“The company announced the plan in late July to the general applause of privacy advocates – and the hesitant acceptance of online advertising firms, which worried that rejected cookies could limit the effectiveness of targeted ads on the Web,” said Wired News at the time, going on:
“Third-party cookie placement has been a hot target for electronic privacy advocates because it is a mechanism through which the third party may build a cookie-based profile of the sites a user visits.
“Microsoft said it made its decision to offer the software after its own research showed that the use of third-party cookies, even though anonymous, was a matter of great consumer concern.
“The most omnipresent third-party cookies are those placed by Internet advertising networks, which manage the ads that appear at many websites. Top companies in this business category include DoubleClick and Engage.
“DoubleClick came under fire last year when a planned acquisition would have made it possible for the company to identify Web users by name.”
‘Inherently exempts cookies”
CNET quotes Bono spokeswoman Kimberly Pencille as saying the proposed law as written deals with monitoring software, not text files, meaning that it, “inherently exempts cookies. Furthermore, Section 3 of the law addresses the exemption of cookies, saying that they’re data files set by interactive service companies used to provide information.
“But the NAI has remained worried because the bill doesn’t specifically exempt cookies set by third parties, Hughes said.”
The proposed federal law to regulate spyware failed to win approval last year, but its backers are trying again, says CNET, adding:
“The House Committee on Energy and Commerce scheduled a hearing last week on its version of the spyware bill supported by Bono and by committee chairman Joe Barton, a Texas Republican.
“The effort stalled in Congress in 2004 when the House of Representatives approved the Spy Act by a 399 to 1 margin, but the Senate never voted. Even though last week’s hearing was a formality, the process is being closely watched by technology companies because it could result in changes to the legislation this time around.”
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See:-
profile – Public Workshop on Online Profiling, Center for Democracy and Technology, Federal Trade Commission testimony, 1999
unlawful technologies – Cookie fans chip away at spyware bill, ZDNet, February 3, 2005
privacy enhancement - MS Releases Privacy Patch, Wired News, September 1, 2000
