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Google Fails To Deploy "Crumbled Cookies"

A year ago, Google promised to lead the charge against one of the most prominent issues in online privacy, but the company has made little headway. The lack of progress underscores the Web industry's resistance to altering their practices with respect to cookies.

After Google announced that it would purchase DoubleClick, which serves many of the display ads seen across the Web, privacy watchers raised concerns that the combination of Google's search data and DoubleClick's cookies would give one company too much information about individual Web users. Google responded by promising to deploy technology that would minimize the cookies' invasiveness. Its answer came in the form of "crumbled cookies," or smaller broken cookies that contain less information.

But so far nothing more has been mentioned. CEO Eric Schmidt pinned the company's failure to deploy the plan on regulatory restrictions that kept Google from discussing the plan with DoubleClick until the Federal Trade Commission approved the merger. He also said the plan was more complex than Google originally thought. "What we've discovered about cookies is that every question leads to a one-hour conversation."

Read the whole story at Financial Times »

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