The European Commission took things a step further last month when it signaled its intention to regulate cookies and spam . Although spam can be annoying, it can also be a useful low-cost marketing tool, allowing small businesses to connect with otherwise unreachable customers. Most people simply won t be willing to make the extra effort that opting in requires. At best the spam ban would be superfluous, since rapidly improving filtering software already allows customers to make their own choices about what types of e-mail they want to receive. But if regulating spam will hurt only some European e-businesses, restricting cookies will handicap them all.
Cookies are digital tags that are saved to an Internet user s computer.
Among other uses, these tiny files are used to keep track of online shopping carts and record how many times a user sees a certain advertisement. They also help Web sites identify when a regular visitor has returned, so that the visitor need not re-enter his identification information every time or see the same ads repeatedly. European online advertisers would be devastated by a cookie ban. If we didn t use cookies, it would horribly affect the way we collect data, says Greg Turzynski, managing partner at Optimedia, a division of Publicis SA of France. We want to know who is looking at what on the Web.