Bostonist: Surprise! White House Keeps Information on Visitors to Whitehouse.gov

Josh

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 10:20:03 -0500

Wait - aren't these Webtrends cookies the third-party sort? (I'm not being facetious, I'm really asking because this whole thing isn't my area of expertise.)

Ezra

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 14:54:01 -0500

Yeah, the whole panic over the cookie thing is utterly idiotic. I thought this story died in 1998 or so. Sending an HTTP request, that is, just going to their site with your browser, sends them your IP address; otherwise, their server couldn't send the page back to your machine. Any reasonably smart log crunching software can give you pretty much the same information as cookies in most cases. Cookies are really mostly pernicious from a privacy angle if they are third party cookies (like the ones that Bostonist sets, for example), and then it's sort of arguable.

Josh

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 08:59:38 -0500

Fair enough - I can't pretend to be anything near an expert in this area, so I depend heavily on Richard Smith, who is. He says there's the potential here for significant data-gathering, which goes to Web Trends and can then be used by their clients (in this case, the White House, presumably). For what it's worth, and the cookie is definitely there - you can see it (in Explorer, anyway) under "Privacy Report" in the "View" menu. I'll concede, too, that cookies aren't necessarily so pernicious, but I am inclined to wonder what sort of site management the folks at whitehouse.gov would do with information gleaned from these cookies. "Add more sports content"? "Go after advertisers in a specific market"? That stuff might fall under the category of opinion polling with an eye toward electoral strategy, but if so, it isn't really the province of a site that uses federal money. I'm not saying anything illegal is going on here (although there is an interesting law review article waiting to be written about whether the government's placement of cookies on people's computers is a violation of the Fourth Amendment), just that it's a little questionable in light of the administration's recent record on privacy and snooping.

saltydog

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 08:18:42 -0500

Two things. When a public site that you do not log into uses cookies, there is no harm really. They typically assign a generic "user/session" id to you anonymously and simply use this id to add to their web logs. This enhances their logging ability so that they can know not only which pages were viewed by their visitors, but which pages tend to be viewed together, how long a visitor stays on their site, what page is typically the last page a viewer sees before they abandon the site to go elsewhere. This is all basic site usage and traffic analysis that departments can use to make decisions about how to manage their site. Should we add more sports content? Should we go after advertisers in a specific market? Etc... No harm no foul. Second, I bounced around the White House site a bit (10 minutes worth) and could not get it to drop a cookie on my browser. Not that I'd mind that though...