A TRUSTe study released today shows that 42% of people clean out their cookies on a weekly basis, and only 15% of survey respondents reporting that they never clean them out and instead wait for them to naturally expire. Where as this report is not fully unexpected, it is a blow to behavioral target marketing companies who are now left scratching their heads about exactly how they are going to collect the data they need to serve up relevant ads.

We use cookies all the time in web-development for many reasons, not limited to storing sessions where logins are required to indeed target ads. The information received is anonymous and yet privacy concerns prevail with users who do not fully understand the technologies and the benefits cookies can bring to their online experience.

The report suggests that many companies are now trying to harvest personal data posted online by users in social networking profiles and other rich informational properties such as forums, which to me at least is far more big brother and personal than cookies and does bring forth concerns of privacy online.

Practicality aside!

This would be a hard standard to achieve, but I for one would be in support of some kind of database of cookies with quality control and transparency of their purpose to then be shared with adware software companies so that they could discern which cookies to leave in place. We could also work towards browsers and operating systems policing cookies as an outsourced service rather like we do for viruses today. Permission based cookies could then be stored separately and be less prone to being deleted during traditional weekly maintenance of a users system.

The silver lining to this report is that a growing amount of people have positive outlooks on only being shown ads they will find interesting.