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.
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.
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