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Firms Use Illegal Cookies To Collect Internet Information
Published Jun 18, 2009
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Companies involved in compiling survey reports in the region are corrupting the industry and discouraging participants by using illegal cookies to track and record their activities on the net.
Market research firm Nielsen has named some of the leading players following this.
According to Nielsen, Real-Opinions who just completed a two-month trial for its system "Effective Measure", uses a cookie deletion solution called Digital Helix, employing flash cookies, which is not legal as per international requirements.
Concerns regarding the new technology's explicit breach of consumers privacy, were dismissed by Real Opinions.
The company stated that the technology complies with EU Privacy Principles and US-EU Safe Harbour privacy principles.
DJ, Client Development Director, said that the system collects census style demographic profile information and links it to website traffic analytics to help media agencies to be more targeted with their campaigns.
He said Real Opinions had signed its first agreement with bayt.
com to provide audience measurement, and named some local newspapers that have been up for the trial and considering to sign up for the measurement.
Tahir Khalil, Associate Director, Head of the Finance Practice at Nielsen On-line, said "overcoming the cookie deletion could involve flash-based cookies, which is placing information outside the temporary internet folder, a procedure very difficult for non-professional internet users to discover".
"According to privacy policies and standards, flash-based cookies could breach the laws.
Despite the lack of related laws and regulations in the UAE, it has been expressed that the UAE follows the US and UK rules.
This way, once such a law is issued, research bodies who follow those policies are able to comply easily with local rules."
DJ confirmed "Effective Measure" utilised flash cookies, but he said that the company abides by "several directives in the US and UK".
"Regarding our technique, we use a combination of first party, third party and flash cookies.
This combined approach means that we only revert to flash cookies when both the first party cookie and third party cookie are not present."
He said: "We are not the only system that uses flash cookies in the world.
We have basically advanced the ways of tracking web users."
He added: "Like other systems, Effective Measure has an option for people to opt out of being tracked.
We are about to launch a 'permanent opt out' where people can choose never to be tracked on our system.
"It is important to note that people who opt out of other systems which don't get round the cookie deletion issue, are tracked again and automatically opted back in, if they delete their cookies.
"He said that being tracked by cookies over and over again despite deleting them is more annoying to users, because they will have no way to stop it unless they delete the cookies each time they access internet.
"With Digital Helix people who choose to opt-out will never be tracked again."
Emirates Business contacted Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) to clarify the matter.
Knowing that there are no specific laws for privacy protection, the UAE currently follows the guidelines of the US and EU privacy policies.
TRA responded by confirming that flash cookies were illegal and would be considered and abuse of the
".ae Domain Adminstration" policy, in case the website in question was registered under a ".ae" domain.
DJ said he had not had any personal correspondence with TRA regarding the matter but he also said the websites were ".com" domains.
He also assured that senior analysts of US and UK policies say flash cookies are not against any laws of privacy.
"We are currently speaking with international web clients for online measurement in the region and they do not have any objections to Digital Helix."
Yet, he reinstated in an e-mail to Emirates Business that Real Opinions would be ready to hold talks with TRA to "assess exactly what the policy states".
Comparing results between flash cookies and regular cookies, Khalil said the tracking only saw a very low percentage of cookie deletion.
"We were to close to 100 per cent tracking."
DJ said the rate of responses from the audience to fill in their profile information was 10 per cent, "a very good result compared to UK where rate ranges merely between one and three per cent".
He said that in the two-month trial, the system was able to pool 15,000 profiles in the region.
Nielsen's survey was launched last week with an official launch of the offering of its SiteCensus services including site tagging and demographic survey expected by the end of June.
This follows the Maktoob portal signing with Nielsen for SiteCensus service in February 2009.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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