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Cookies Detected and or Removed By Spyware Programmes Report
Excerpts…
Revenue Effects
Cookie deletion can interfere with advertisers’ tracking of conversion rates — preventing advertisers from correctly deducing the sources of sales that occurred, and preventing advertisers from paying commissions accordingly. But these effects can be corrected via appropriate bonus payments. Suppose an advertiser knows that 25% of its affiliates’ cookies are being deleted by anti-spyware programs. (Out of 100 affiliate-originating purchases, 25 would be lost.) In principle the advertiser could offer a 33% bonus to its affiliates. Then, for each of the 75 purchases correctly tracked, the advertiser would pay commission at a 1.33 multiplier, thereby paying out a total of 100 units of commission in total. An affected advertiser could implement such a bonus while keeping its promotional costs no higher than a competitor paying the base commission rate, whose cookies are, for whatever reason, not deleted.Zone Alarm
In a spyware scan performed using ZoneAlarm, I was surprised to find that all detected cookies were removed automatically — not just found and listed. I had pressed a button labeled “Scan for Spyware,” suggesting that the program would only scan, but not remove, whatever threats it found. Instead, ZoneAlarm removed detected cookies without any further prompting. As best I could tell, this removal was irreversible: The cookies were simply deleted, not quarantined, and I found no undelete function. That said, it’s unlikely that many consumers would want to reverse the detection. After all, these cookies don’t directly benefit users, so there’s no clear reason why users would want the cookies back.Conclusions
While anti-spyware programs delete some cookies, it’s also striking what cookies no programs touched. Consider, for example, the main cookies for Google.com. Reports indicate that Google keeps records of what each of its users searches for — and cookies let Google group and analyze all searches from a given user. The totality of a user’s search history typically includes substantial sensitive information, often personally-identifying information, as uncovered in analysis of search data recently released by AOL. Most users probably face more serious risks from search engines storing such sensitive search logs, than from ad networks tracking which merchants users visit. Yet many anti-spyware programs delete ordinary marketing cookies, while leaving the Google.com cookie untouched.
