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To: Dick Smith who wrote (3080)	10/27/1998 11:25:00 PM
From: trilobyte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32932

All who is interested ... about privacy issue .. wwww.pcworld.com great reading for people who are not totally paranoid .. yet 8-)) tlb

To: Dick Smith who wrote (3080)	10/28/1998 6:07:00 PM
From: Spots	Respond to of 32932

>>it is reasonable that there need not be any customer context in the part of their web site which does not need it. A perfectly valid point, and I completely agree. One serious problem is you don't know if they're being silly or heavy-handed or nefarious. I note that the Microsoft web site was similar for awhile; but now you only need to accept the cookie if you're entering a registration-required area (though you're cookie-refusing finger gets a hell of a lot of exercise everywhere there). >>I might need a cookie to book my reservation or check my frequent flyer miles, although we know there are other ways to work it. Well, this is a good example of the distinction. A cookie for frequent flier miles IS ridiculous, because we all know they have a database entry for you which is more-or-less permanent. Shame on them. For a reservation, not so clear. Sure, if you actually book it they have a database entry; but for a lot of inquiries relative to a reservation a database access is unnecessary, which means you can take the load off the backend servers and handle them by the web server itself. The backend server is going against a world-wide database which has to maintain its integrity--a very expensive proposition. The web server can respond with general info to many requests. And the volume is tremendous. UAL's reservation system was one of the first really high-volume transaction processing systems in the world -- anybody who has sold in the transaction processing industry for more than just a few years has had to benchmark against it at some time or other. IBM constructed special hardware for it. Other airlines are in a similar boat. Of course, this doesn't mean that the cookie is well used; but it does serve a legitimate function in this case. It may also serve any number of illegitimate ones (and probably does, unfortunately). >>So I do the most secure practical thing, and delete the cookie after I've used them, so that they cannot connect this appearance of me with the next one. Can't argue with that, since it's what I do too <gg>. The coin isn't entirely one sided, though. The sides don't have a clear heads-or-tails distinction, unfortunately. Spots