Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, B Holroyd wrote:
> "Rampant paranoia"?

And then followed up with an example of just that.
 
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/31/1429206&mode=thread

Come on - Jon Katz is a muckraker. His basic assumption - that we ever
/had/ privacy - is absurd. Privacy as we've come to /redefine/ it in
the face of such data collection as he speaks of is something entirely
different than the privacy enjoyed by say, residents of NYC in the
1800s. There have always been tax records, church records,
birth/death/hospital records, they've just been under the control of
faceless bureaucrats. Now a different set of information is under the
control of /private corporations/, and that's what we're reacting
against. Two different ideas.

> I'm not against cookies, cookies are cool and let web developers do a lot
> for the users; I'm against clandestine data collection about *me*.

I'm against the idea of ditching cookies (a symptom and tool being used
in the cross-referencing activity, not the root of the main problem, which
is that the databases exist to cross-reference them against.)

If you really don't want doubleclick to get you, then do something that
will send a real message - redefine ad.doubleclick.net to localhost. If
they start to see a drop in traffic, they'll react. If you think that
turning off /all/ cookies is the way to do this, you're mistaken.

> Do you not see how important it is for us to control, as much as possible,
> the information about us that's gathered by any group -- private, public,
> governmental, for-profit or non-profit?

Yes. And I also understand that if we're going to use the Internet,
telephones, have insurance, social security, credit cards, we have to
take *new* steps to legislate against the unethical or intrusive
use of that information. Turning cookies off en masse is not going to 
have any effect whatsoever on the fact that such database are being
created, only make it more difficult to cross-reference against them.

Talk to a legislator and inform them of how you feel, and mention that
if doubleclick uses cookies to cross-reference against demographic
databases, it will raise the costs of e-commerce Web site development
for *everyone*, for the benefit of a single corporation. Hit them in
the wallet.

> Ask any German who remembers WWII why the EU wants to require any group
> that gathers information about individuals to do so with the individual's
> full knowledge and prior permission, rather than in the sneaky,
> under-handed manner practiced by DoubleClick (and others, without doubt).

Sure.

> If our _government_ did such a thing, the hue and cry would resound to the
> moon -- witness the flap over Echelon. Do you believe that the entities
> known as "corporations" are more benign than those known as "government"? I
> don't.

No, I don't believe that either of them are trustworthy or benign. But
burning your copy of your draft card didn't do anything about the fact
that the government still had its copy, and that it still had the
authority to send you to the jungle. Protests like turning cookies off
are useless.

Simon St. Laurent's book _Cookies_ discusses this a bit in reference
to Microsoft - they manage to keep a single UID across all of their
sites. How?  They used to use a redirect if you went to
www.microsoft.com - that sent you to msnid.msn.com, with an identifier
in the URL, which was set as a cookie in the msn.com domain, then
issued another redirect back to microsoft.com, again with the UID in
the URL, and then microsoft.com set another cookie. Whee. Now they've
managed to work around the domain restriction on cookies. And they
know who you are across both microsoft and msn.

Cookies aren't the problem. Don't you see this?

Steve