NAI to require minimum 5 year expiration date for opt out cookies

One week ago, I published an open letter to the Network Advertising Initiative, in which I complained that the behavioral advertising opt-out cookies offered by many NAI members had been set to shamefully short periods of time -- in some cases, as short of six months.

Over the past few days, executives from many NAI member firms contacted me to let me know that they were shifting to a better policy. I outlined the updated policies of those companies in this blog post.

This morning, I was contacted by the Executive Director of the Network Advertising Initiative, who informed me that the group will be requiring that all NAI member firms set their opt-out cookies to last at least five years. I expect to see news of this posted to the NAI site in the next few days.

Depending on your perspective, you could either see this as:

1. A sign that the industry can effectively and rapidly police itself when notified of a problem, or

2. Proof that the industry has for nearly a decade offered crippled opt-outs that silently vanished just a few months after the consumer expressed their wish to not be tracked.

While it is quite fun to see the industry scrambling to perform emergency damage control in response to my blog posts, it is pretty pathetic that I had to do this at all. This multi-billion online advertising industry should not depend upon a single graduate student to keep it honest.

My comments on the new proposed federal cookie and web tracking guidelines

One week ago, Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, asked for feedback and input on a proposed overhaul of the rules prohibiting the use of tracking cookies on federal web sites.

I submitted my 5 page comments document today. For those of you who don't want to wait until all of the comments have been posted to the White House web site, I've embedded my submission here.

TACO 2.0 released

Update: Mozilla has approved TACO 2.0. All current TACO users should see a prompt to update the add-on the next time they restart Firefox.

I am happy to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out (TACO) Firefox add-on.

This version has been completely rewritten from scratch, primarily by Daniel Witte @ Mozilla Corp. It also includes opt-out cookies for 6 additional advertising companies: Snoobi, comScore VoiceFive, Hurra, Criteo, Coremetrics and EyeWonder.

I am waiting for the nice folks at Mozilla to read through the code and then approve it. If you lack patience, and simply cannot wait, TACO 2.0 can be installed by clicking here. Otherwise, wait a few days until Mozilla approves it, and then the 100,000 or so existing TACO users should receive an automatic update to this new version.

A total rewrite

The original TACO was essentially a fork of Google's Advertising Cookie Opt Out Plugin. Google's original tool included one cookie -- I simply modified it to include an additional 100 or so opt out cookies.

The problem is that Google's original code wasn't all that good -- it would reload all of the opt-out cookies each time a new window/tab was opened, and then force them to be reloaded again every 10 minutes, even if none of the opt-out cookies had changed.

Perhaps this isn't such a big deal for a tool that is designed to install a single opt-out cookie. However, it clearly didn't scale well.

Unfortunately, my Javascript skills are pretty horrible, and so I really wasn't up to the task of rewriting TACO by myself. Luckily, Daniel Witte, Mozilla's resident cookie guru offered to lend a hand, and eventually rewrote the entire add-on from scratch.

This new version is considerably faster, and no longer re-installs 100+ cookies into the browser each time a new tab/window is opened nor does it reinstall them again every 10 minutes after that.

Blocking third party cookies

One of the biggest complaint from TACO power-users was that the tool would not function when the user had configured the browser to block all 3rd party cookies (a suggested practice, and one which both Safari and Chrome do by default). I am happy to announce that TACO now plays nicely with blocked 3rd party cookies, and so the paranoid amongst you should feel free to go ahead and block them without having to worry about it breaking TACO.

A note about EyeWonder

Finally, blog-readers may remember that I recently pointed to EyeWonder's non-existent broken opt-out as an example of one the worst practices in the industry.

After 9 days, it looks like the company finally designed and implemented fixed the opt-out, and so users of TACO 2.0 are automatically opted out of all of EyeWonder's behavioral advertising.