Privacy advocates are calling on an Internet regulating group to adopt stricter standards for cookies, saying that marketers abuse the information-gathering technology and interfere with the right to surf the Web unaccosted.
"There should never be a case where private firms and government agencies are writing and reading information on a consumer's hard disk without explicit authorization," James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, said in a news release Monday.
This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force - a loose coalition of tech heads that develops online standards - is meeting in Memphis, Tennessee, to decide whether to endorse a proposal to curtail the now-rampant use of cookies.
The proposal, drafted in February by two experts at Bell Labs and Netscape, would limit the sharing of cookies among different domains and would make cookies much more visible to users. Web advertising agencies are, understandably, opposed to the plan. As reported last month by Wired News, some agencies are mounting a campaign to keep the cookies coming.
Cookies are small data files sent to your browser when you visit a site and are saved on your hard drive. While cookies sound harmless enough, they can litter your hard drive as fossilized reminders of past visits to, for example, Amazon.com, the Baywatch homepage, or HotWired. They also allow advertisers to target you with specific ads based on that data.
(Wired News sends cookies in conjunction with each of the numerous framesets on our pages in order to track site traffic. In response to complaints, engineers are working to reduce the number of cookies sent. A fix is expected in the next several weeks.)
Groups like Consumer Project on Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the National Association of Elementary School Principals, sent a letter Monday to the IETF endorsing the proposal and emphasizing the need for "transparency" in data-gathering techniques on the Net. Copies of the letter were sent to Ira Magaziner, head of the White House task force on electronic commerce; Microsoft founder Bill Gates; Nathan Mhyrvold, Microsoft's chief technical officer; Jim Barksdale, president of Netscape; Marc Andreessen, Netscape's chief technical officer; and Federal Trade Commissioner Christine Varney.
