Defending cookies

Online marketers are ramping up a counteroffensive to protect cookies and convince consumers that they shouldn't be lumped in with inimical spyware, The Wall Street Journal reports:

Faced with reports showing that more and more computer users regularly delete the tracking files automatically downloaded by Web browsers, marketers and Web site publishers are launching a "cookies can be good for you" campaign. They argue that cookies -- small files that Web sites use to identify users and to serve up targeted ads -- don't deserve their bad reputation and shouldn't be lumped together with such Web scourges as spyware and viruses. ...

Cookies date to the early days of the Web, and are important to helping Internet companies know who their users are. But in recent years, the emergence of spyware and viruses has made consumers increasingly suspicious about files that are automatically downloaded to their computers. Cookies are by and large benign compared with spyware, which is malicious software aimed at hijacking a user's computer or stealing personal data. Still, privacy advocates say computer users generally dislike the notion of being tracked online, even if their personal details aren't being used.

Marketers, meanwhile, counter that cookies serve plenty of useful features consumers may not realize -- such as automatically filling in a username on a site that requires logging in, or helping a weather site remember a ZIP Code so that it can show a local forecast on return visits.

Like many other sites, SeattlePI.com uses cookies to enable a number of features, including:

• Allowing people to vote in online polls, and displaying updated results every time they come back to see the poll.
• Letting registered users log in to and post messages in our forums.
• Giving registered users access to archived stories from the newspaper that predate our full-scale rollout of news online in 1999.
• Limiting how often certain pop-up and pop-under ads appear as users move through the NWsource.com network of sites. (That's right: the ad folks don't want you to see the same ads on every page you visit. Blocking the cookies, however, may cause that to happen.)
• Keeping those ads that suddenly take over a page from appearing more than once every 24 hours.