Internet Cookies are Crumbling

Today's NYT Business article covered the February 2006 Jupiter Research that found that 2/5 (41%) male Internet users deleted cookies at least once per week, while 1/4 (25%) of female users polled wiped them out.

This is an increase in manual cookie deletion from previous year's surveys, such as the Revenue Science one that took place in December 2005, indicating two trends:

1. Capability awareness: As more people learn how to do this to prevent advertisers and other marketers from compiling statistics about site visits, they exercise this capability.
2. Risk awareness: As more stories are reported about privacy breaches (from credit card/insurance companies/ etc losing sensitive data or safeguards being breached by hackers to government agencies collecting telephone records to scan for potential terrorist contacts), users are taking preventative security measures.
   

If your business relies on Internet cookies to evaluate the effectiveness of its web traffic or ad campaigns, perhaps it's time to look into other technologies or methodologies for your metrics.