Google dodges crumbled cookies issue

I read with great interest a news item on ‘crumbled cookies’ which appeared in the FT today. It seems that Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, blames the regulatory authorities for the mess surrounding the issue of diminished cookies.
I think the mobile advertising arena is in danger of being left out here.

Schmidt argues that rules surrounding his company’s acquisition of DoubleClick have meant that Google’s execs couldn’t talk to DoubleClick’s execs until the deal had been approved.
In the meantime, Google had been experimenting with reduced data cookies – labelled crumbled cookies – to try to resolve privacy issues.
Those pushing to keep the Net as open as possible – let’s call them Open Netters – have argued that Google’s knowledge of people’s searches combined with DoublClick’s knowledge of which sites those same people visit poses a serious threat to their privacy.
Google had managed to stave off criticism by promising to test out new technology. But it hasn’t released details of how the trials went.
Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying that Google has, “Yet to start substantial internal deliberations about how to deal with the issue.” That wasn’t good enough for Marc Rosenberg from the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. He thought it was too late now the deal had gone through.

Whatever happens, the solution has got to get the support of the advertising industry in general. And there’s the rub. The vast majority of  mobile handsets – even those with full HTML (not WAP) browsers don’t accept cookies anyway.

So whatever shape a crumbled cookie takes, surely it must be agreed with the creators of mobile browsers like Opera and Access and the handset makers like Nokia? Otherwise advertisers stand to miss out on data collected from what will swiftly become the majority – users of the mobile internet.

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