Government Web sites follow visitors' movements

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re: access logs vs cookies

Access logs only provide a one dimensional view of how your site is being used. Cookies allow you to see just how a site is being used in terms of user flow and choices being made. You can measure things such as seeing if changes to your site's menu system or logical page arrangement is resulting in people finding their way efficiently or not.

Government sites are traditionally packed full of tons of information. How efficiently one can access this information is a direct measure of how useful the site is. If using cookies to track the path that people make through a site and also whether people come back and revisit the site allow the web team to make critical improvements to the functionality of the site, then they are providing much more than browsing access logs are capable of. This is all that cookies can do - they cannot see files on your computer or reveal anything other than your surfing behavior on the site that uses them.

Oh, then there is the issue of browser compatibility. The US patent office purports to only have webforms that use IE and will not function under Mozilla properly, if at all. If they would take advantage of proper metrics handling, they would see that this is a huge mistake.

Since cookies cannot reveal anything about the user other than their surfing behavior on a site, the idea of forcing them to expire at the end of a session is absurd. This is a classic example of tech controlling legislation written by total idiots. The only reason that this kind of legislation is written in the first place is because it makes for good press. Idiot reporters writing misinformed stories about issues and legislation that is badly written by idiot politicians and based on complete lack of understanding of what in hell they are addressing in the first place. The boss guy in 'Dilbert' comes to mind.

My prior post is an example of how this particular limitation on the use of cookies can be misused to make things worse in terms of people's rights than make them better. Nobody's rights are being violated by having cookies placed on their machine. It is not technically possible.

And if it were... say someone figures a way of crafting a cookie that would open a backdoor to your system... then you will have one hell of a lawsuit against the website operators in question. Since cookies are readily visible to the user (if they opt to turn on confirming them in their browser) then the chance of getting busted by propogating such an imaginary evil cookie would be a virtual certainty.

Posted by: cppsolutions   Posted on: 01/05/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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