Wall Street Journal, February 14, 1996, p. B6. Internet Users Say They'd Rather Not Share Their 'Cookies' By Joan E. Rigdon Netscape Communications Corp., responding to complaints from consumers, said it will change its Internet browser software so customers can prevent on-line merchants from tracking their footsteps in cyberspace. The ruckus began Monday, when the Financial Times reported on a little-known feature in Netscape software called Cookies. Cookies helps merchants on the Internet's multimedia World Wide Web track what customers do in their stores, and how long they spend doing it. Cookies stores this data on the customer's own hard drive, (in a text file called "Cookies.txt" in the Netscape directory) . The next time the customer visits the merchant's store, the merchant can read about the customer's last visit, and serve up a version of the store that's tailored for the customer. Cookies won't show merchants what other stores the customer has visited. Net surfers have complained on-line about the feature, saying it's an invasion of privacy and that it ties up the resources of their own computers. Netscape, the Mountain View, Calif., maker of the No. 1 Internet browsing software, says it didn't think people might object to Cookies, since merchants can track a customer's footsteps even without Cookies, and few have complained about that. Product manager Jeff Treuhaft contends Cookies actually helps customers, because among other things, it allows customers to buy several things from different parts, or "pages," of an Internet store, and only pay once, instead of once at every page. Also, the Internet's standards board, called the Internet Engineering Task Force, has asked Netscape to propose Cookies as a standard for the Internet, Netscape said. Still, Netscape agreed to change the software. In future versions of Netscape, customers will have the choice of refusing to let a merchant lay down "a persistent Cookie," Mr. Treuhaft says, referring to Cookies that track customer movements for days, weeks or months, instead of just a single Internet session, as most do. "We want to give the user as much control as possible," Mr. Treuhaft says. [End] Still, be alert for invasive snoops and tracking analytics, not only by NSCP, but by all those invaders crying mea culpa, "you misjudge the goodness in our hearts, we did it for your own good, like all good parents. Trust us."