At the risk of losing readers by using the “government” word in the opening sentence, it’s true to note that of the many buzzwords emanating from the IT sector over recent years, “e-government” is perhaps one of the most exciting.  There are few areas of our lives not touched by governmental procedures and regulations, red tape and information overload.  What better place than the internet to streamline this myriad of operations into a unified, interactive and consistent medium? Where one website or portal can enable you to perform most of your more tedious activities quickly and efficiently, from paying your car registration through to making a resource consent submission. Yet before you can say “Incis”, we have cases of well-meaning but mal-informed government policies threatening to impede progress.

Before you all put up your hands, the example I am referring to is the blanket anti-cookie policy. Some time ago I became aware of this policy, but that was in the earlier days of e-government (when Maurice Williamson was the beehive tech-buff) and cookies were a classic example of good technology being misused as the unwritten rules of the internet were evolving.  Few of you now, I suspect, will find sites you’ve visited mysteriously becoming your homepage or inserting themselves in your favourites file – all favourite tricks in the early days of cookie use.  Yes, there are some bad ‘cookies’ out there but before you go banning the entire population why not find out exactly what the majority of ‘cookies’ can do for you.

Of course I am not talking about something your Gran pulled out of the oven.  On the Internet a cookie is a miniscule file that is automatically downloaded onto your computer when you click on or view certain things.  It could be a page of a site or an advertising banner or tile that triggers a cookie to be sent to your computer, thereby allowing your computer to be differentiated from all the others visiting a site.

Cookies allow website managers to do some pretty powerful things from a marketing perspective.  Like tracking customer churn, greeting returning visitors by name (if they’ve given permission, of course), or tracking people’s paths from clicking on a banner through to making an online transaction.  Key to remember however, is that cookies’ abilities are limited by the power you give them – use them judiciously, openly, and ethnically, and cookies can give a website owner an incredible ability to understand the visiting habits of its customer base.  If this sounds uncomfortably like “Big Brother “ (Orwell’s version, that is), then think again – this means you can identify where visitors get lost on your site, where the navigational bottlenecks are, how many visitors your marketing efforts are attracting, and so forth.  Even a basic insight such as “how many people have visited my website” cannot be accurately determined without them.

The irony is that nobody needs this information more than the public sector.  Conducting a large amount of consumer research for councils over the years has taught me one thing -  they must maintain total accountability to their ratepayers and stakeholders and need as much accurate information as possible on services they are providing and the effectiveness of their communications. All local councils and government departments must furnish accurate details about their operations at least annually.  Yet they are prepared to introduce policy that makes this increasingly difficult to achieve in regards to the online space.

To illustrate how much of a non-issue cookies are to Joe-internet user, and the resultant needlessness of a blanket cookies ban for e-government, may I cite the case of a New Zealand RedSheriff client.  This key publisher,  who is a key publisher to the Internet consumer in New Zealand, printed an extensive article about cookies and gave its readers explicit instructions as to how to remove cookies and prevent them from entering a system.  We closely monitored the publisher’s site traffic statistics (using our cookies-based measurement system) to see if the article had any impact on the cookies-related statistics– the change was so minimal as to be non-existent.  This parallels with Red Sheriff’s research in Australia on the cookie issue where less than 10% of users have ever turned cookies off.  As more and more of the general public come on-line, this percentage is continuing to decrease.

I have some sympathy with those trying to direct public sector Internet Policy.  The medium is so varied and ever-changing that what may seem to be a good blanket policy one day is superseded the next.   Common sense should dictate that you do not ban cookies when there are hard and fast facts that it is an safe, effective way to conduct sophisticated, targeted market research on the Internet.

The same natural caution you apply in not putting highly personal or sensitive information into any Internet arena will protect you from any possible ‘harm’ a cookie might do.    Most of the time we don’t even know they are there.   We can remove them from our files if we so wish and they help to make the Internet a truly interactive experience. As part of a sophisticated website marketing and research package “cookies” are an amazing tool – let’s hope our policy makers can find something more harmful than ‘cookies’ to worry about.

Jonathan Dodd