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I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this is already in use by ad networks.

by jarin 16y ago

gyardley 16y ago
I would be, at least for ad networks based in the United States or Europe. The rhetoric around online privacy has gotten rather heated lately, and they're trying to avoid government regulation by being on their best behavior and trying to self-regulate. Evercookies are the opposite of that - it'd be like holding up a sign saying 'make me a target'. Back when things were a little less heated (aka a couple of years ago), some companies did use a combination of cookies and Local Shared Objects in order to provide redundancy - information deleted from one was later restored by the other. Those companies have almost certainly stopped. Not that it indicates any wrongdoing, because there's a class-action lawsuit for everything remotely advertising-related, but there's been a ton of class-action lawsuits in the Flash cookie space. I believe the ones involving actively rewriting deleted information have largely been settled, and now it's mostly lawyers trolling companies for the use of Flash cookies to store any type of information more complicated than a volume setting. For a recent example, search for Del Vecchio vs Amazon.
- jarin 16y ago
  Ah very cool. Tangentially related: I've been helping a client get some affiliate marketing set up, and the email-based affiliates require CAN-SPAM compliance. Basically, this requires a generic unsubscribe link where people can put in their email address to be added to a "suppression file" blacklist, which the affiliates can then download. It's intended to act as a shared blacklist when you're working with multiple affiliates, but I'm wondering what's to stop someone from just harvesting suppression files?
  - iigs 16y ago
    I believe CAN-SPAM has provisions against that, but several vendors have standardized on storing the suppression files as a list of md5s. Of course that is not bulletproof (the source space is small, especially among the big mail providers) but at the moment it seems to have shifted the economics favorably.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this is already in use by ad networks.

by jarin 16y ago

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this is already in use by ad networks.

I would be, at least for ad networks based in the United States or Europe. The rhetoric around online privacy has gotten rather heated lately, and they're trying to avoid government regulation by being on their best behavior and trying to self-regulate. Evercookies are the opposite of that - it'd be like holding up a sign saying 'make me a target'. Back when things were a little less heated (aka a couple of years ago), some companies did use a combination of cookies and Local Shared Objects in order to provide redundancy - information deleted from one was later restored by the other. Those companies have almost certainly stopped. Not that it indicates any wrongdoing, because there's a class-action lawsuit for everything remotely advertising-related, but there's been a ton of class-action lawsuits in the Flash cookie space. I believe the ones involving actively rewriting deleted information have largely been settled, and now it's mostly lawyers trolling companies for the use of Flash cookies to store any type of information more complicated than a volume setting. For a recent example, search for Del Vecchio vs Amazon.

jarin 16y ago
Ah very cool. Tangentially related: I've been helping a client get some affiliate marketing set up, and the email-based affiliates require CAN-SPAM compliance. Basically, this requires a generic unsubscribe link where people can put in their email address to be added to a "suppression file" blacklist, which the affiliates can then download. It's intended to act as a shared blacklist when you're working with multiple affiliates, but I'm wondering what's to stop someone from just harvesting suppression files?
- iigs 16y ago
  I believe CAN-SPAM has provisions against that, but several vendors have standardized on storing the suppression files as a list of md5s. Of course that is not bulletproof (the source space is small, especially among the big mail providers) but at the moment it seems to have shifted the economics favorably.