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166 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

of Web site visitors occurs in the background without the visitor’s knowledge. It
is conducted not just by individual Web sites but by advertising networks such
as Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo, and DoubleClick that are capable of tracking
personal browsing behavior across thousands of Web sites. Both Web site
publishers and the advertising industry defend tracking of individuals across
the Web because doing so allows more relevant ads to be targeted to users,
and it pays for the cost of publishing Web sites. In this sense, it’s like broadcast
television: advertiser-supported content that is free to the user. The commercial
demand for this personal information is virtually insatiable.
Cookies are small text files deposited on a computer hard drive when a user
visits Web sites. Cookies identify the visitor’s Web browser software and track
visits to the Web site. When the visitor returns to a site that has stored a cookie,
the Web site software will search the visitor’s computer, find the cookie, and
know what that person has done in the past. It may also update the cookie,
depending on the activity during the visit. In this way, the site can customize
its content for each visitor’s interests. For example, if you purchase a book on
Amazon.com and return later from the same browser, the site will welcome you
by name and recommend other books of interest based on your past purchases.
DoubleClick, described earlier in this chapter, uses cookies to build its dossiers
with details of online purchases and to examine the behavior of Web site visi-
tors. Figure 4.3 illustrates how cookies work.
Web sites using cookie technology cannot directly obtain visitors’ names and
addresses. However, if a person has registered at a site, that information can
be combined with cookie data to identify the visitor. Web site owners can also
combine the data they have gathered from cookies and other Web site monitor-
ing tools with personal data from other sources, such as offline data collected
from surveys or paper catalog purchases, to develop very detailed profiles of
their visitors.
There are now even more subtle and surreptitious tools for surveillance
of Internet users. So-called “super cookies” or Flash cookies cannot be easily

FIGURE 4.3 HOW COOKIES IDENTIFY WEB VISITORS

Cookies are written by a Web site on a visitor’s hard drive. When the visitor returns to that Web site,
the Web server requests the ID number from the cookie and uses it to access the data stored by that
server on that visitor. The Web site can then use these data to display personalized information.

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