BING! You're It! - And You Pay For It Too - Even With Cashback

The facilities now available to web retailers that track how you got to their site allow all manner of "interesting" things to be done once you get there.

A case in point is this article noting that at least one online seller actually charges a premium if you find their site via the Bing "Cashback" facility. Now I personally have not used this facility, in fact I do very little of my purchasing online for a variety of reasons but that's another matter, however the article presents the case very well. If you read the article you'll find that the author used the Bing Cahsback facility to find a reseller for a camera - then went to the site following the link. The price quoted in the Bing listing is the one that was shown on the web site when he pulled up the link. He then opened up the same page (presumably by copying and pasting the URL in the address bar) using a DIFFERENT web browser and the price shown was lower by almost $50 (US$43.84 to be exact but we're in Canada and the difference would have been close to CDN$50)

What happened here?

What happened is an example of one of the tracking facilities available to resellers being used in this case to penalize the purchaser rather than just target them with "better" advertising targeting and more focused marketing as has been touted by most who sell this type of service and facility.

You see the typical "static" web site neither sets nor watches for "cookies" - a piece of information that is sent to and stored by your PC's browser in a special area. You can tell your browser not to store cookies but they're so pervasive that this will break some sites almost to the point of being unuseable. The cookie itself rarely contains any actual information. Its name is usually built up of a random string of letters/numbers, and its contents may be nothing more than the name of the web site you visited. But sites that are linked "behind the scenes" can and do share information about what you were doing when the cookie was set - and maybe even all that you have ever done since the cookie was set - a history of your surfing.

The cookie is a key to a database, a key that unlocks the information about what your browser has done on any/every system that knows about the cookie/key and that has access to the backend database. Note that it is the browser that they have information about - so if your spouse or kids use the same account on your computer it tracks them too. If you use a different browser the cookies are stored in different areas so they don't track the other browser in the same way. This is key to this whole story!

By surfing with (for example) Firefox - then, once the site is found, using IE (or Opera or some other browser) the difference between "with a cookie" and "without a cookie" becomes aparrent. It is interesting to view some sites with cookies turned off - or from a browser that has not had a lot of history browsing the net, compared to viewing the same site with your regular browser. That's what happened in this instance - and the actual price information was different.

So, be aware that your experience with some sites may be colored by the fact you have either visted before or visited other sites that share their data infrastructure.

More Reading

• Wikipedia - HTTP_cookie
• Cookie Central - Cookies and Privacy FAQ
• Using Flash Cookies - Not as easily controlled - watch out!