Over the weekend Alex Fowler, the person in charge of Mozilla’s global privacy and public policy initiatives, issued this blog post to describe a new approach that Firefox developers are taking to enable Web surfers to take better control of when they can be tracked by advertisers. The post comes in the wake of the United States’ Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) 122-page report endorsing a “Do Not Track” list that parallels the “Do Not Call” list enforced for telemarketers. It reportedly precedes an expected announcement later today from Google to add a “Keep My Opt Outs” button to the Chrome browser.

Both Microsoft and Mozilla have provided the ability to “block cookies” among the “Tools/Options” in the pull-down menus of their respective browsers. The instructions assocaited with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE8), illustrated here, allow for total blocking or selective blocking. The same approach will be baked into the forthcoming IE9.

Mozilla’s new approach has been criticized on two, closely related, fronts. First, because it adds more information to the header, it means that browsers are providing more information about themselves in the interest of promoting their privacy. As Fowler terms it, they “broadcast their desire to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking” through the HTTP header. This is not, inherently a bad thing, and it has the potential to do great good by getting us off of a dependence on either cookies or black lists. More to the point, as Fowler notes in his post the approach “requires both browsers and sites to implement it to be fully effective.” In this regard, we haven’t made much progress because the site operators have no financial incentive to take part in the transition.

Mozilla’s approach looks like a precursor to “Emancipay,” which is a relationship management (and payment) schema developed as part of ProjectVRM. With Emancipay, not only does a browser indicate whether to “block cookies,” he or she can also indicate preferred payment vehicles, as well as a a range preferences or policies that the site operator most conform to in order to carry out commerce with the browser/shopper. Stepping away from the cookie-based Web economy is an important step to promoting efficient Conversational Commerce.

The paradox of “cookie blocking” is one of the topics that is bound to come up repeatedly at C3-Conversational Commerce Conference next week. Blocking cookies in the bowels of the browser may give a site visitor some sense of accomplishment, but it removes one of the important mechanisms for revealing their true likes, preferences, practices and policies. Moving attention from the browser to the HTTP: header starts to provide more flexibility for engagement between a browser or shopper and a site operator. For that reason alone, it deserves attention, and is worthy of more discussion at venues like C3.

Categories: Articles

Tags: ecommerce, conversational commerce, Mozilla