Owing, perhaps, to a singular feeble-mindedness characterized by equal parts hypocrisy and laziness, I've never fully bought into the notion that holds voting as a prerequisite to avowing political opinions. The actual lever-pulling, it could be argued, is a mere footnote (or epilog, at best) to the political narrative, which deals in persuasion of masses rather than individuals - which is why it's hard to muster the appropriate indignation toward the current wave of "privacy-enabling" software patches, designed to scotch cookies, applets, ActiveX controls, and various other transfers tagged rather arbitrarily as "downloadable technologies."
Whether cookies and their ilk are best characterized as "downloadable," "uploadable," or simply "loadable," is only an inch beside the point, as the gist of these technologies lies in their ability to establish a conversation between a client and a server. And that conversation, it seems, strikes some as an uncomfortable invasion of privacy, if only because it occurs surreptitiously. Bringing all the mechanics and milestones of this process into the foreground contributes to more elastic user control; in this sense, products like Intracept's X-Ray Vision, Internet JunkBusters, CookieCutter, and most of all, the Internet Engineering Task Force's RFC 2109 are all admirable. But every plan has its flaw, and the small downside of these efforts resides in the unlikely event that people actually start to use them.
Because, let's face it, disallowing Web-site surveillance for the sake of blanket personal invisibility is like wearing a paper bag over your head at the comedy club to disguise your laughter. Sure, it's just like Intracept says, "most of the top 100 do a pretty thorough job of tracking your movements as you surf cyberspace." They'd better! There's not a site in the chart that couldn't use a content, navigation, or structural overhaul - but how are they ever supposed to improve if they're not taking advantage of accurate reports detailing what's clicking and what's sucking on their wundersites? As long as cookies aren't tied to our Social Security numbers, it's arguably in everyone's best interest for our movements to be metered, measured, and scrutinized. After an eternity of free-market blather, the Net has finally made good on the notion of our consumer choices being our votes. And while there's plausible merit in the idea of complete abstinence (and undisputable merit in the idea of user choice), the truism is still aggravatingly true: If you don't like what you see, and you don't vote for what you like, you have no one to blame but yourself.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
