Cookie Monster
Reputable news organizations maintain a strict separation between the opinion pages and the news pages. The editorial board’s opinions are not supposed to influence the news report, and vice versa. Some media critics fear that this “Chinese wall” between the editorial writers and the news reporters has been eroding.
So it was heartening to see this strict separation on vivid display in the Wall Street Journal last week. The Journal’s Jan. 21 editorial page came out forcefully against the Federal Trade Commission “Do Not Track” proposal. The FTC report recommends that consumers be given the right to “opt out” of the pervasive practice of online data tracking by advertisers who use “cookies” and other tools to gather personal data on web users.
The Journal’s editorial writers opined:
Technology that further customizes browsing to be responsive to user needs and preferences is a benefit to consumers and makes their online time more efficient … Advertisers are not in the business of data collection for nefarious snooping purposes, but to direct their products to customers who may want them.”
This is gratifying proof that the editorial writers are not influenced by their brothers and sisters on the news side of the editorial divide, where the Journal continues its superb 13-part (so far) series on Internet privacy.
Influenced? It doesn’t appear that the editorial writers even read their own paper.
“Marketers are spying on Internet users – observing and remembering people’s clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests,” the Journal special report begins.
The largest U.S. websites are installing new and intrusive consumer-tracking technologies on the computers of people visiting their sites—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time—a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The tracking files represent the leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of, their interests and activities, in real time.
