On The Trail

A company is marketing a work around to the problem of people deleting cookies. Is it a solution or just a way to make people even more distrustful of data gathering on the web?
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United Virtuality’s “PIE” product uses a flash capability called “Flash Local Shared Objects” as a replacement for persistent cookies. Basically, it works the same way as a cookie, except folks don’t know about it and their browsers don’t automatically block it. Great! until people find out about it. Then two things will happen:

1. People will get uncomfortable and distrust web analytics even more than they do now, and
2. Technologies will evolve to block this information too.

Why bother? Let’s just live with our current cookie solution and make is as above-board and transparent as possible. This is a much better long term solution.

More reading:

Out-law.com
Eric Peterson’s Blog