Google-Murdoch: cookies get another important job

Our reliance on cookies is all-consuming. While the vast majority of the internet population has no idea what they are, the internet industry continues to put them to ever more potent uses.

Consider, for example, the latest announcement – issued in the wake of accusations from Rupert Murdoch that it profits knowlingly from content theft – that Google would update its publisher options so media-owners can prevent visitors from going to any more than five pieces of subscription-based content for free.

Essentially, Google’s First Click Free programme dealt with subscription content by allowing subscription-based online papers like the Wall Street Journal to show one article for free to Google-driven visitors and then a subscription page if they tried to move on in the site. The problem with this was that – by simply going back to Google – you could re-access any article you wanted and never have to upgrade.

Now, through cookies, Google will track users to see if anyone goes to a subscription-based piece of content on a single publisher site more than five times. When they do, the subscription page will pop up.

It is a massively crucial, strategic battle that’s being waged – between Google and publishers, between free content and paid, between reinventing business models and making the old ones work - and Google’s attempts to make a concession in this battle relies utterly on cookies.

That’s great – we use them for everything to do with tracking, from remembering a user’s password to delivering ‘people who bought also bought’ features to launching behaviourally targeted ad campaigns at our unsuspecting user base. Yes, cookies are great, except:

1. The general public is indeed unsuspecting about them. A general sense of privacy concern hangs as a constant cloud over the web. If people were really to discover the power of cookies; what they do and how they work, they would – rightly or wrongly – have a fit

2. People delete them. The last study I saw revealed that 30% of cookies are deleted – whether to hide browsing habits or because of the general sense of privacy fear that exists

So here’s the question? Do we as an industry wait for a sudden upsurge of ill-informed paranoia to force the issue on cookies and undermine pretty much all of the things that allow web businesses to make money, or do we seek to control the debate by educating our customers about how exactly we are able to do the things we do (and risk causing the sudden upsurge in ill-informed paranoia in the process)?

Or maybe I am being paranoid myself and people are already happy to make the trade-off between privacy and all the wonders that the web makes available - in my view, the price of free is our personal information. But, the future lies in our being able to hand over that personal information only to those people we trust and value. To become one of those brands, advertisers might think about being upfront about how exactly things like cookies work.