And so the privacy advocate comes out with his first post... ;-) Welcome to Pocket PC Thoughts, home of the cookie! :lol:
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by GroovBird
But cookies can and are used to track people's habits. And when that information about where YOU surf is collected, merged, and available for inspection without your consent then that's an invasion of your privacy. Hence cookies can be used as "spyware"
|
I'd challenge that assertion by pointing out that without knowing your identity, without aggregation of that data to form individual profiles, it's not a violation of your privacy. When I drive my car down a street and drive over one of those traffic counters, is my privacy violated because someone is counting my car to measure the flow of traffic? No, not unless it's also scanning my license plate to learn about me personally. In my opinion, non-personalized data collection is not a violation of anyone's privacy.
Privacy is certainly an issue worth protecting in this day and age, but being paranoid helps no one. I remember this issue of advertisers tracking ad views through cookies came up in the late '90s, and certain people were mad about it for, oh, 5 minutes. Then when spyware really started to come out, people realized what TRUE privacy violations were...and cookies 'aint that.
Anyway, I think I've said all I will say on the subject. People are welcome to block cookies if they wish, but please, no one email me asking why they're getting spyware warnings. ;-)