Fred Wilson’s posts on the need to protect cookies from anti-cookie activism (an awkward phrase, but for lack of a better one) haven’t done much to persuade me. I don’t like the idea of being tracked across sessions without my explicit awareness – which usually takes the form of a login – and therefore delete my cookies almost every day. I appreciate anti-virus software sharp enough to identify the cookies from popular cross-site advertising networks and nuke them. If this means I have to log in again to Bloglines or repersonalize Google News, so be it.
Given that, I like Fred’s argument that relevancy is replacing efficiency, and there’s no denying that cookies and other forms of cross-session tracking are the way to better relevancy – so what to do? I’m hoping someone will take the initiative and bake a better cookie system – one that would allow cookies to be set automatically, so they’re not interrupting me every time I go to a site, but one that respected my desire not to be exploited commercially without receiving anything of value in return. It hit me this morning – why couldn’t we extend P3P to do that? The system is already pretty good, but with finer, more detailed categories in P3P I’d be able to accurately make the distinctions I need to to be truly comfortable. For instance, if I could decide through a combination of my browser and P3P to block all cookies used for ‘tracking across multiple domains for commercial purposes of no value to the end-user’ but enable cookies that allow ‘tracking usage of a single domain for commercial purposes in exchange for free services’ I wouldn’t feel as much of a need to delete cookies every day. Efforts to improve relevancy could proceed unimpeded by my twitchy ‘sanitize my browser‘ finger.
Of course, I really don’t see anything coming out of the W3C any time soon – they work on a different timeframe than I do – so perhaps it’d be better to have a private company propose and implement this new standards. This is one of those situations where a behemoth like Microsoft could actually use its weight for good…
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