July
16
2007
So, I was cruising My Netscape and saw this interesting link title from BBC News: "Google cookies will auto delete"
Auto delete? Since when is this a special feature that only Google can bring to market? All cookies have an expiration date – last time I checked. It’s just that often, they are set with an expiration date so far in the future as to be effectively perpetual.
The article quotes Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy council, as saying (in a statement)
"listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we’ve concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies."
Oh, and there’s this interesting bit from the article, "They will be deleted unless the user returns to a Google site within the two-year period, prompting a re-setting of the file’s lifespan."
Interesting, it’s not a fixed two years, it’s relative to your last visit to Google so every time you visit Google the cookies expiration date will be reset to a new date. When was the last time you went 2 years without visiting a website that you found extremely useful (as most people would say about Google)?
I actually like the idea, from a certain point of view, users who have not visited the site in some amount of time (2 years in this case) could be deemed to have abandoned the site (in a much more considered way than we in web analytics tend to look at it) and therefore Google doesn’t need to keep track of that user’s preferences anymore.
The thing that I find weird is that the BBC – via the title of the article – seems to think that Google is doing something that no one else could or might do.
I wonder what the implications to web analytics would be if the providers implemented a similar function? Would it wreak havoc on the data? Probably not unless the cookie expiration date was set absurdly low (less than 4 weeks or so). What about a new metric – "Lost Visitors" or "Qualified Abandons"?
