You’re sitting alone at your computer, late at night, browsing the internet. You’re irritated with your son because he managed to delete all your saved passwords and browser history stuff. You visit a popular news website and — cue eerie music — you find that the site still remembers who you are!
Not really all that traumatic is it? After all, one of the big drawbacks of online services is their limitation in remembering who we are. Every time we use a new computer we have to dredge up all kinds of passwords and login names just to check our mail or comment on a funny video. That’s where cookies come in.
Ask most people about “browser cookies” and they will probably shrug. And yet these small pieces of information, stored by websites on our computers, are a ubiquitous part of online life. Every time you click a “remember me” button on your webmail or favourite social network, you are using cookies.
So why on earth are a group of ordinary Americans suing a whole range of media brands about these nibbles of information? They claim that the companies – including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, ABC and NBC — used a dodgy technology to retrieve cookie-like information even though all such private data had been deliberately cleared from their browsers.
How is this possible? All of these companies use Adobe’s widely adopted Flash technology to add multimedia content to their sites. Flash — a browser “plugin” — stores its own cookies, and these are not deleted when private data is cleared from a browser.
The technology reaches into those Flash cookies and revives supposedly dead browser cookies as “zombies”, essentially “remembering” you even though you have told it to forget. Quantcast, who created the technology, are also being sued for good measure.
In the most technical sense the plaintiffs have a solid case. Raising cookies from the dead amounts, at its most extreme, to illegal surveillance and at the very least to an infringement of the right to privacy. At the very least Quantcast, a web analytics firm, should have navigated this privacy minefield better.
And yet, the whole thing smacks of yet another opportunistic suit by the world’s most notoriously litigious people. Yes, the practice is unseemly and technically illegal, but reporting the defendants to a regulator would be a lot more credible than rushing to court seeking “unspecified damages”.
How, exactly, were you “damaged” Edward Valdez and friends? Did the FBI burst through your door and arrest you for using too many emoticons in your email? Did the ESPN site sell your private data to porn spammers? Did ABC phone your wife and tell her about your secret midget porn folder?
That’s my issue with the privacy nuts out there. Most of them live in countries where they enjoy more personal freedom than 99,9% of all the people that have ever lived. And here they are suing a video site — one that they frequently use — for remembering their names.
Yes, this is a thin-end-of-the-wedge issue, and yes we need to be clear about what we permit companies to do with our private info. But our response should be both rational and proportionate. Cookies, zombie or otherwise, make our lives easier — just as credit cards and cellphones do.
The fact that all three of those technologies open us up to the possibility of surveillance is something we need to be wary of but ultimately accept. The alternative is to opt out completely. It’s essentially a choice between more freedom and more security. I, for one, am on the side of freedom.