The Online Cookie Jar: The Cookies May Be Disappearing, But The Fingerprints Remain

Online privacy is a nasty question to dissect, mostly because it’s a term that is at odds with itself. We love going online, we hate being followed, but you can’t go online without someone knowing what you’re doing. Truth be told, for the average web surfer, the only ones who really care what you’re up to are people who want to sell you something. In fact, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, some 80% of marketing campaigns use online behavioral monitoring to pinpoint their target audience. So yes, someone out there is paying money to know what sites you visit, what you clicked on, what you bought, what you skipped over, and so on. Anyone with any experience in web marketing knows this data is indespensible and isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. What is potentially going away soon is the mechanism for collecting this data.

For years it’s all been about the cookie. You hit up my site, I give you a cookie, that cookie follows you around and reports back to me. I compile the data on your activity and sell it off to whoever is interested so they can follow you around the net with more ads for that revealing euro swimsuit you "accidentally" clicked on. But cookies can expire. Or they can be blocked by the user. And they are not supported on mobile devices. This is where the new tech comes into play.

You can shake the jar without taking a cookie, but you can’t help leaving behind fingerprints.

Your computer or smart phone is unique. Websites can read the individual characteristics of your device to determine your identity much like forensics experts can read the lines and bowls of a print to nail a perp. A recent article in Forbes by Adam Tanner explains that digital fingerprinting takes the, “characteristics of a computer such as what plugins and software you have installed, the size of the screen, the time zone, fonts and other features of any particular machine,” and uses it know exactly who is visiting a website. What’s that, you say? You run the most popular operating system on the most popular platform with a fixed screen size so you think you won’t stand out? According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, if you use Flash or Java (and let’s face it, you do, everybody does), then there is a 94% chance that you are uniquely identifiable by your digital fingerprint.

And it goes deeper. Companies like AdStack sell a service that allows you to send out an email whose content upon opening can be changed in real time. What? Huh? So the initial email that lands in your inbox is essentially just a hollow frame, a place holder, without predetermined content. When you open the email, a host of behavior monitoring data is computed instantly to determine what you will see. A business could run different promotions based on availability of inventory. Or maybe there has been an important change in your web history from the time the email went out till the time you open it. No problem, the content is fluid.

This kind of tech is powerful, but try and read up on who is using it and you will soon find there aren’t many owning up to it. It bears quite a stigma, but is this justified? That’s a question worth asking. Let’s put it another way: You can’t have the web without being watched, and the watchers fuel the advertisers, who in turn keep much of the web free. The question, then, is do you prefer advertisements tailored to your behavior, or not? Here is a true story. I set my free Spotify account to “House on Pooh Corner” for my year old daughter. In less than an hour I heard an ad for provocative, hard core rap music, and two ads for Trojan condoms. I’ll take tailored content everytime.