Two previous articles you can find in our Privacy Watch area argue strongly that the reality of storehouses of cookies on your computer presents you with a cookie management issue and recurrent task you can scarcely afford to duck, and which you cannot effectively delegate.

How web browsers and supporting non-browser software facilitate the cookie management process is, therefore, an important question for millions of web surfers. This article continues a tutorial review of tools for cookie management. It will consider one Macintosh and one PC program, doing so largely in tutorial, rather than in critical-reviewer, mode.

Before going to this week's tutorial material, a word on the number of separate cookie storehouses you may have on your computer is in order. You will have at least two such files if you are using different browsers. You will also have at least two separate files if you are running a recent version of Netscape which provides for separate recognition (by Netscape) of different users, and there are indeed two (or more) separate Netscape users at your computer. Be alert, therefore, to the possible need to manage more than one cookie storehouse that may be on your computer.

This tutorial review begins with MagicCookie Monster for the Macintosh by Dr. Jon's Software (see the end of this article for the URL). Then it will go on to Cookie Crusher for Windows. The next screen photo shows a list of cookie names and contents in the main screen of Magic Cookie Monster.

.

 QUICK DELETION OF MULTIPLE COOKIES IN YOUR NETSCAPE COOKIE STOREHOUSE

You can select individual items or groups of items and then click on the button named "Trash It!" to have them deleted. You can also sort the items by clicking on any of the three headings at the top of the screen. For example, to sort all lines the cookie names' alphabetical order, click on the heading named "Cookie Name".

The program is designed to support management of Netscape cookies. Notice that at the top of the screen there is provision for you to switch from one Nestcape cookie file to another, if there are more than one Netscape users at your computer. (Another article in our Privacy Watch area deals with Internet Explorer's built-in cookie management functions.)

MagicCookie Monster places all of the available information about a cookie in a second screen, as soon as you double-click on the line for the cookie in the main screen. Here is a photo of the second screen.

Shown here is an example of the so-called "persistent cookie" -- the party who places this cookie on your screen expects it to reside in your computer for ten years, and it is an ID cookie. If you are shopping at this site, an ID cookie is needed; but why on earth can a needed cookie not be set to expire next month, or next year? Why ten years from today?

Among the limitations of MagicCookie Monster, one merits highlight. It gives you no help in constructing rules that your browser would be forced to use so as to admit certain kinds of cookies and reject other kinds. The most elegant help in cookie management would come in a program that allows you to block out a whole class of nuisance cookies, based on rules you provide, knowing full well that if you inappropriately block a certain cookie what you want to do at the pertinent site in question will not work (you are doing on-line shopping, e.g.). Then, in this elegant cookie manager program, you can simply go back and tell the program to make an exception of that particular cookie!

A small step in the direction of this kind of elegance is built into Internet Explorer, as shown in the next screen.

 REAL-TIME COOKIE-CONTROL, EVEN FOR THOSE THAT EXPIRE AT THE END OF YOUR BROWSING SESSION

However, for much better automation of cookie management one needs to have a PC and 'move up ' to Limit Software's Cookie Crusher program (v2.6 -- see the end of this article for the URL). Limit Software's promotional text emphasizes that "Cookie Crusher controls cookies in real-time before they are placed on your hard drive. Real-time cookie controlling technology has many distinct advantages over other methods. Benefits include the following:
* All cookies are handled. With static technology (e.g. programs that delete or alter the actual cookie files), only cookies that are "stored" on your hard drive after the browser is closed are edited. Cookies that are accepted by the browser in temporary memory, but not stored in the cookie text file(s), are not controlled since they never appear in the cookie text file(s).
* There is no need to run any program after you are done browsing. All cookies are handled while you utilize the World Wide Web."

You will receive a useful on-line tour of this product at Limit Software's web site. This tour includes several screen photos, to help you get a concrete image of how to set and use the program and its flexibility.

A photo of the main program screen, taken from the just-cited web site, follows: 

Limit Software says this about the start-up screen. "The top lists which sites you want Cookie Crusher to always accept or reject cookies from. The bottom radio buttons determine what Cookie Crusher does with cookies that are not in either list. For example, ìaccept allî accepts all cookies except for those listed in the 'Reject from' list. The 'prompt for confirmation' option alerts you when Cookie Crusher receives a cookie that is not found in either list." One key question not answered in the tour is how to use Cookie Crusher to deal with a storehouse of cookies that are already on your computer at the time you install this program.

COULD THIS NEW TARGETED MARKETING BE A BIG WASTE OF TIME?

In closing this article, it seems worthwhile to try to add some perspective concerning a common property of the persistent ID cookies. They often have so many alphanumeric bytes that it is trivially easy to have a unique ID for every human being on earth. Moreover, with a collection of attached disk drives and a suitable database management program, data for every human being could probably be kept on one computer.

"No one wants to do that," you say. And you are right; but what this comment brings to mind is the fact that many organizations now have computing hardware and software that allows them to maintain quite long dossiers of information on each a few million persons or households.

In the old days of mass-marketing strategies that relied upon the appeal of a brand name and heavy exposure to the appeal through a few extremely widely consulted media (e.g. TV), having this computing capacity was not of much practical interest.

But now we have a new craze -- segmenting the market into an extremely large number of separate demographic and life-style groups, and then carefully tailoring the advertising appeal so as to try and press the right 'hot button' in a selected subset of these groups.

For this approach to work, you must have reliable population (or household) samples within each group to which the marketing appeal will be sent. And this means that the marketer will need to compile a humongous file of personal or household dossiers.

When marketers had to run real-life surveys of samples of people, and then try to use the information to help their clients (merchandisers) make sense out of the latters' sales records, there was really no hope of compiling such files, unless you were a GM or one of the pharmaceutical, or banking or communications giants.

But then internet arrives!

The internet allows a few clever guys to sit back in their offices while their smart computer programs track millions of peoples' buying and surfing behaviour across multiple web sites (another article in our Privacy Watch gives an outline of how this is done). What a God-send for targeted marketing!

Surely this new targeted must produce a great boost in economic growth!

Surprise! That is not at all evident.

There is not any possibility of demonstrating empirically that across an entire economy this new targeted marketing has provided a global net increase in profitability after taking its costs into account. It is a very moot point that it will achieve any such thing, at least while global money supply growth is held to modest levels. (It is easy to have economy-wide statistics show system-wide increases in profitability under rapid money-supply growth -- essentially we have more paper money in our pockets so we think we are richer than we were before but 'everybody' has more of the paper, and so negligible increase in real wealth has taken place. Another smoke and miirors game of this kind is played when we march into a 'developing country' and rapidly monetize its economy, and then the statistics show another "Asian Tiger", when in reality the monetized market economy is growing at the expense of the pre-existing non-monetized economy and true economic growth is FAR below what the statistics show.)

Thus, as with any major new system-wide gimmick, this new targeted marketing will cause a new cast of fast growers to appear on the scene and the media hype may be such as to fool all of us into thinking that this set of fast growers represents the whole economy. In fact, what may be happening at the systemic level is merely a redistribution of money from old winners (now become new losers) to new winners, so that when money supply growth is taken out of the picture there is no evident substantial increase in global profitability.

In short, these humongous files of dossiers being compiled by the new target marketers, with the help of cookies, will surely create a new caste of winners and losers in the economy; but whether the new marketing technology has meant a global profitability increase is a moot point, and it is impossible to empirically demonstrate that it has done so. (I am omitting the longish technical argument that supports this wild-sounding remark.)

The point behind this conclusion is that all these cookies being placed on our computers, many designed to outlive us, could be one great big waste if time from the perspective of system-wide economic growth, But it is not a waste of time for those engaged in the never ending 'market battles' that deliver winners and losers almost every time there is a spate for quarterly profit reports.

WHERE TO GET THE SOFTWARE

To obtain and learn more about the two programs highlighted above go to these web sites: Dr. Jon's Software for the MagicCookie Monsterfor the Macintosh and Limit Software's Cookie Crusher for Windows PCs .

A serious effort has been made here to respect peoples' copyrights. Any lingering violation will be corrected promptly, as soon as someone points out where the violation takes place. Contact lestone@arawak.net.

© 2000 Arawak Enterprises. All rights reserved