More on cookies

[Michael Haseltine]

At 07:26 PM 9/3/96 -0700, you wrote:
...
>
>Actually, this is wrong.  It would be more like if you gave each person a
>number as they walked in the door, recording what time you gave out the
>number.  Then, as they left, you would collect the number, recording the
>time again.
>
>The big difference here is that personal anonymity is still there.  Of
>course, using cookies is even less of a problem than the above example
>since it requires only the time to pass a handful of characters across the
>Internet to your computer and back again to the server later on. 

Well, about as anonymous as my IP address. That's why I used phone number in
my example.

>If you look at the expiration on these cookies, by the way, most of them
>are a couple of days.

My experience has been that it's more like in 1999 or 2000.

>---
>David G. Risner
>Network Services Administrator
>Southwestern University School of Law, Los Angeles, CA
>drisner at swlaw.edu  213/738-6762

We're kind of arguing details here, which there's some benefit in nailing
down, but to me the issue is one of feeling I have a right to say what
information others gather about me and what they're allowed to do with it,
and in this case they aren't asking my permission. I feel the same way about
my medical information, etc.

Setting Netscape to verify each cookie isn't a good solution, either. It's a
nuisance to have to click a dialog box for each cookie, up to one for every
graphic, 14 on the last page I looked at.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Haseltine -- haseltin at ag.arizona.edu
Office of Arid Lands Studies, Arid Lands Information Center