Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy (original) (raw)

Business|Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/business/giving-web-a-memory-cost-its-users-privacy.html

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Sept. 4, 2001

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September 4, 2001

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One day in June 1994, Lou Montulli sat down at his keyboard to fix one of the biggest problems facing the fledgling World Wide Web -- and, as so often happens in the world of technology, he created another one.

At that moment in Web history, every visit to a site was like the first, with no automatic way to record that a visitor had dropped by before. Any commercial transaction would have to be handled from start to finish in one visit, and visitors would have to work their way through the same clicks again and again; it was like visiting a store where the shopkeeper had amnesia.

At 24, Mr. Montulli was the ninth employee hired by what would come to be known as Netscape Communications, and was already known as a programmer of exceptional skill. So he quickly came up with an ingenious idea to address the problem and hammered out a five-page document describing the technology that he and co-workers would design to give the Web a memory.

The solution called for each Web site's computer to place a small file on each visitor's machine that would track what the visitor's computer did at that site. Mr. Montulli called his new technology a ''persistent client state object,'' but he had a catchier name in mind, one from earlier days of computing. When machines passed little bits of code back and forth for such purposes as identification, early programmers called the exchanged data ''magic cookies.'' Mr. Montulli would call his invention, a direct descendant, a ''cookie.''

It was a turning point in the history of computing: at a stroke, cookies changed the Web from a place of discontinuous visits into a rich environment in which to shop, to play -- even, for some people, to live. Cookies fundamentally altered the nature of surfing the Web from being a relatively anonymous activity, like wandering the streets of a large city, to the kind of environment where records of one's transactions, movements and even desires could be stored, sorted, mined and sold.

Since then, cookies have become nearly ubiquitous -- and that has many people upset. A recent survey by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling organization, found that 67 percent of Americans identify online privacy as a big concern -- far more than those who identify fighting crime (55 percent) or building an antimissile shield (22 percent).

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