Re:- cookies and privacy

To: Steff Watkins <Steff.Watkins@Bristol.ac.uk>, www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Subject: Re:- cookies and privacy
From: John Pettitt <jpp@software.net>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 10:17:09 -0700

Here is how the doubleclick thing works (I suggest it to them).

They buy up ad space in bulk from sites, they then sell it in small
chunks to companies.

On a site that is to display an ad one puts a reference to an image
on the doubleclick site.  When you load the page your browser grabs the
image from doubleclick.com. Two things then happen:

1) doubleclick looks at all your browser data (domain, machine type etc)
and decides which ad to show based on profiles of target consumers.

2) they send you the ad graphic with a cookie.

The reason for the cookie is so that they know *which* as graphic they
gave you (since the url on the image points to a standard location).

When you click the image your browser returns the cookie and they use
it to figure which ad you saw and where to send you.

We do exactly the same thing with our ads on the cwsapps list.  Except
that we are just trying to figure out your OS so we can send you an ad
for a product you may want to buy (mac people *hate* being sold windows
products, win 95 people don't want win 3.1 products etc).

John

John Pettitt, jpp@software.net
EVP, CyberSource Corporation, 415 473 3065

PGP Key available at:
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/htbin/pks-extract-key.pl?op=get&search=0xB7AA3705

Follow-Ups:

Re:- cookies and privacy

From: Rob Hartill <hartill@ooo.lanl.gov>

Re: - cookies and privacy

From: Steff Watkins <Steff.Watkins@Bristol.ac.uk>