Cookies in the jar turns into whiskey in the jar

For almost as long as “cookies” have existed on the Internet, companies have made a habit out of using them to track you, your “behavior” on the Internet, and to turn you into something “measurable”. For almost as long, there have been countermeasurements: “cookie blockers”, “ad blockers”, “privacy shields”, and so on. Cookies are, of course, only one of many data points being collected about you while using the Internet.

Companies using third-party service for anything from payment solutions to advertising and the collecting of statistics often don’t fully understand the implications of their choosing one service over another. And for the past several years, this has turned into a rat race.

On one side of the fence, there are companies like Facebook, Google, Quantcast, Amazon, Cambridge Analytica, and other, that want to know everything about you at almost any cost, and on the other side of the fence we have tools to “protect our privacy” during our online experience such as VPN, “ad blockers”, “privacy shields”, “Facebook containers”, “Privacy Badger”, and so on. (None of these tools will prevent you from being tracked by those to make it their business to track you, they are way ahead of such trivial attempts.)

So now people are blocking sites, all kinds of sites without necessarily understanding the implications of their actions. What makes it harder to distinguish “good sites” from “bad sites” is that quite a few of these “trackers” and “cloud asset sites” use sub-domains, like aj38305.trackyourcookies.com, so we end up blocking everything from “*.trackyourcookies.com”.

A company’s e-commerce site using third-party services to collect statistics and “web insights” can quite easily shoot itself in the foot, as the same services are also used in the payment verification process. I have had countless “Verfied by Visa” and “Secure Checkout” transactions fail because I choose to block certain sites, or prevent them from setting cookies. So this actually leads to poor sales performance, rather than enhancing it.

Companies using third-party services for e-commerce checkout solutions need to ask the service provider the question: Will your payment solution work with “ad blockers” and “privacy shields” before using them, or risk losing customers who find far less privacy intrusive services.

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