• by May 10, 2005

By Bennie Smith

A recent consumer survey by Insight Express said that 77 percent of consumers who delete cookies do so, in part, to "clear up disk space." Fifty-seven percent thought that clearing cookies makes their computer "run faster," and 51 percent "were told to do so" by a third-party trusted authority such as an anti-spyware vendor.

These results pinpoint the real nature of the problem that those who use cookies face. We as an industry -- Web site publishers, advertisers, marketers, and vendors -- have not done the job of providing consumers with good, useful information about the value of cookies. There have been consumer protections put into place, but we are failing at the task of empowering the consumer through transparency and clear communication. This has allowed misinformation to dominate, and has provided third parties with the opportunity to insert themselves as the trusted authority in the relationship between the consumer and the Web site.

That being said, consumers are facing a real and growing problem in the form of spyware applications that surreptitiously live on their computer and actively interfere with its operation. Having not well articulated the value of standard Web technologies, we have allowed legitimate Web site advertising to get lumped in with the problem and not with the solution.

The lack of consumer recognition of the difference between a site publisher generated pop-up (e.g., a magazine site using a pop-up to ask you to subscribe) and the pop-up barrages of untargeted and low-relevancy offers has led to a confusion in boundaries between advertising on Web sites and locally served, secretly installed spyware.

Apparently, this confusion has been encouraged and perhaps exploited by many security vendors, who see increased profits in the targeting of standard Web site technologies that do no harm to the desktop.

We believe the answer lies not in circumventing consumer choice, as so-called spyware applications or technologies such as Flash-based persistent identification elements (PIE) do, but rather in engaging consumers and creating greater transparency. We need to fill the information vacuum that has allowed third parties to make specious claims about standard, widely used Web technologies and target them as threats.

In part this involves a public outreach campaign to consumers through the media, and, based on the results of the Insight Express survey, we have a lot of work to do on this front. One easier and more direct way to start would be to find ways to give consumers more information on cookies that they can access from their desktops. Currently, information about the cookies that are set on a browser can be difficult for the consumer to find, understand and make decisions about.

Once we work together to educate consumers so that they understand that cookies neither slow network connections nor take up significant disk space, we will be in a better position. Once they realize that cookies are a necessary aspect of legitimate Web site advertising, and that this advertising is what keeps the Internet free of charge, our position will be even better. But we also must reach out to consumers through our technology in real time, and empower them with the information they need to understand the tools that Web sites employ. Web site publishers, online advertisers, and vendors that utilize cookies need to create new channels to communicate honestly and directly with our users. If we do not, third parties with their own parochial economic incentives will continue to fill the gap. The first step in engaging consumers is to create industry-wide unanimity by putting all of the right people in the same room at the same time. To this end, DoubleClick is acting as Founding Sponsor to the NAI's Spyware and eCommerce summit in New York on May 12.

Bennie Smith is chief privacy officer at DoubleClick.