Choose Party Of First Part

THE LATEST REPORT ABOUT COOKIES from JupiterResearch advises that Web sites would do well to stop relying on tracking cookies placed by third parties for analytics. That is, sites should serve cookies from their own domains to keep track of data ranging from passwords to which pages users viewed. "Aggressive anti-spyware applications .... are widely deployed and extremely effective in removing third-party tracking cookies," states the report, written by Eric Peterson. "Although adopting first-party cookies is not a panacea, site operators are strongly encouraged to do so immediately."
It's not just Jupiter Research that's urging less reliance on third-party cookies. Yesterday, business and technology journalist Adam Penenberg wrote a column in online magazine Slate.com calling for marketers to eliminate tracking cookies.

First-party cookies generally remember information about users' behavior on the site that serves them. For instance, the cookies served by Amazon.com remember users' names, billing addresses and pages viewed within the site.

But third-party cookies potentially keep track of information about users as they surf a variety of Web sites. Among other uses, these types of cookies can be used to categorize users based on their Web-surfing behavior--a technique that some ad executives rely on, but that consumers seem to increasingly view with misgiving.

That misgiving is playing out as cookie deletions. Until this year, many in the online industry took for granted that consumers didn't give cookies much thought one way or the other. Certainly, few harbored the notion that consumers bothered deleting cookies. But in a Jupiter Research report from this spring, Peterson showed that users actually were erasing cookies, with around four in 10 deleting cookies monthly.

While it doesn't require much computer sophistication to delete cookies manually, consumers also use software programs to erase cookies--and those programs especially target third-party cookies, according to the report.

Still, despite the erasures, large media and e-commerce companies continue to use third-party cookies to a surprising degree. Of 12 leading Web sites examined by Jupiter Research, just two--Amazon.com and Travelocity.com--only used first-party cookies.