The little silver bags contained a treat -- and a taunt: "Do you know where your cookies come from?"
The message was printed on tens of thousands of bags of free chocolate chip cookies that were handed out in six cities last fall as part of an advertising campaign from Earthlink, one of the biggest Internet service providers.
The cookies that Earthlink referred to, of course, were not in the bag but on people's PCs: "cookies" is the term for the small files that Web sites place on visitors' computers to help recall where they have been on the site, to determine which advertisements they see and more.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Although the use of cookies is generally benign, the fact that they can be used for detailed tracking of Web users and their activities has upset many consumers. People shop, chat and play online, and look to the Internet for information on health care, for psychological support and even for love. Meanwhile, the technologies for monitoring and analyzing those activities grow more powerful. But when it comes to protecting privacy online, most consumers still do not even know where to start.
Controlling cookies
In the campaign, Earthlink compared its privacy policies with those of the industry leader, America Online, and offered its customers tips on how to control cookies.
"Our position is you should be able to understand what's being revealed about you, and you should be able to control it," said Claudia B. Caplan, the company's vice president in charge of brand marketing. Later this year, Caplan said, the company will also provide software to help customers selectively accept or reject cookies to safeguard their privacy online.
Earthlink said that by the summer it was seeing results: Consumer surveys showed that the "unaided recall" of Earthlink's name -- that is, the percentage of people who would say "Earthlink" in response to a request to list Internet service providers without prompting -- had jumped to 25 percent from 15 percent in the cities where the campaign was used.
"We do believe that privacy was a very, very large component of that," Caplan said. "We had not seen this kind of movement before the privacy initiative." It remains to be seen, however, whether that will translate into more customers for Earthlink. Privacy, it seems, is something that everybody wants but few want to pay for.
Zero-Knowledge Systems, a Montreal company that offers a full suite of privacy protection tools in its flagship product, Freedom, has also found that getting consumers to pay for privacy can be a struggle. Users can use the company's software to selectively block cookies that Web sites try to put on their machines and can even surf the Internet under pseudonyms, hiding their identities but enjoying the benefits of long-term relationships with online merchants.
Although it has one of the best-of-breed packages for privacy, the company and others like it have not had much luck selling it directly to consumers, said Arabella Hallawell, an analyst with Gartner Inc. "It became fairly clear that consumers weren't going to buy the kinds of service on offer," she said.
Consumers' headlong dive into the online environment has amplified privacy risks as never before, said Alan Westin, a consultant who has studied privacy and consumer attitudes toward it for more than three decades. "The average person today is engaged in a level of self-disclosure that is truly unparalleled in the history of Western civilization," he said.
Privacy protection
Businesses have tried to explain consumers' unwillingness to take steps to protect privacy by saying people do not truly care. WebSideStory, a company that measures Internet traffic on 150,000 sites, reported in April that Web site visitors refuse cookies less than 1 percent of the time -- a fact that the company's general counsel and chief privacy officer, Randall K. Broberg, interpreted to mean that "cookies are simply not a big concern among most Internet users."
But those who study the issue say the real picture is more complex. A snapshot of Web behavior does not show the motivations of the people who click the mouse. That deeper understanding comes through surveys and interviews and not just from Web page statistics, said Donna L. Hoffman, who studies online commerce at Vanderbilt University. "Pages don't talk," she said.
Consumers who do want to reject cookies find the task daunting, said Richard M. Smith, the chief technology officer of the Privacy Foundation, a research center based in Denver. "It's nearly impossible to turn them off," he said.
The hunting and clicking necessary to find and deploy the cookie-control features in most Internet browsers is beyond the ability of most users, Smith said, and installing add-on software to do the job requires even more effort and expertise. Even when users do set their computers to reject cookies, he said, "what you find is Web sites require them." Even some major Web sites, including The New York Times on the Web, do not function properly when cookies are rejected.
Consumer attitudes
So what do consumers really want? Despite dozens of surveys of consumer attitudes toward privacy over the years, a nuanced understanding of American attitudes about privacy is only now beginning to emerge. Part of the problem is that no one, in the abstract, is against privacy, so asking whether people favor privacy protection falls under the category that pollsters call "motherhood and apple pie" -- questions that almost always generate favorable responses.
Another complicating factor is that even after more than three years of public debate in the news media and the halls of Congress, 56 percent of those surveyed this year on behalf of the Pew Internet and American Life Project did not even know what cookies were -- and 34 percent of those who have spent a few years online did not know.
Americans do not speak with one voice on privacy issues, said Westin, the privacy consultant. He has identified three groups:
First, there are "privacy fundamentalists," who zealously guard their personal information, reject all offers of consumer benefit in return for personal data and tend to be suspicious of efforts by law enforcement to use surveillance technologies like wiretaps.
On the other end of the spectrum are those Westin calls the "privacy unconcerned," a group that "for US$0.05 off, they'll give you their family history and tell you their vacation plans." These are the people who might have heard the famous comment of Sun Microsystems' chief executive, Scott G. McNealy -- "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -- and thought it was sound advice.
As more people move more of their lives onto the Internet, Westin explained, longstanding boundaries between the groups have shifted. Until the 1990s, he said, those in the unconcerned group made up about 20 percent of the population, and privacy fundamentalists stood at about 25 percent; the pragmatists occupied the middle 55 percent. But a recent poll by Westin showed that the group of unconcerned Americans had shrunk by nearly half, to just 12 percent of the population; the people who shifted, in general, joined the ranks of the pragmatists: not radicalized, but more wary than before.
The largest segment of the population wants to have the ability to make privacy choices, said Harrison M. Rainie, who heads the Pew project. He said that surveys by Pew and others found that consumers "do not want to vest rule-making power in other entities" like government. At the same time, they "feel very comfortable" with government's taking "aggressive enforcement" measures when companies violate their rights, Rainie said, especially when it comes to abuse of financial information and health data.
Collaborative filtering
Many companies are also exploring ways to serve customers without collecting personal information. Moviephone, for example, provides the names of theaters and show times based solely on the caller's ZIP code. And at the Web site for Palm Inc, software from a company called Net Perceptions helps the company make recommendations on Palm gear based on a technology known as collaborative filtering: predicting what a visitor might want based on what other visitors choose, said Nicole Rynee Barnes, the e-business manager for the company.
Privacy is a moving target, and notions about it continue to evolve, said Stewart A. Baker, a lawyer in Washington and a consultant on high-technology issues. The initial horror about cookies has undergone a metamorphosis into a more nuanced attitude. "There's always something we consider private and it's something we can keep private," he said. "Those things that we can't keep private we develop a callus over.
"We're going through one of those transitions now," Baker continued, "but faster."
What Americans might really want, said Michigan's attorney general, Jennifer Granholm, is a sense of privacy that is not absolute, but that reassures them. Granholm, who has mounted aggressive investigations of companies accused of violating consumers' privacy, said that the notion of privacy "can be misconstrued as the right to be left alone."
"What we want is to create a safe place for people to do business and research," she said.
Granholm said that her thinking had evolved over time, and credits much of the shift to conversations with James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who served on a Federal Trade Commission advisory committee on online privacy and security. Like her, Tierney said that he had initially been alarmed by the warnings of privacy advocates about the dangers of cookies and intrusion. But, he said, he had come to realize that this was not a nation of Greta Garbos and Theodore Kaczynskis.
"Privacy is not about being left alone," Tierney said; citizens should be able to feel that the personal data that they entrust to others is protected. "It's about safety."
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