When the cookies munch you

It started out innocently enough. Or did it?

“Cookies” that initially tracked how you navigate a website were merely research tools, right? Ways web developers could find out how their clients sites were attracting customers or visitors to various pages. Ways most popular offerings could be tracked. That’s what the website privacy policies told us.

But it took only the thinnest reed of cynicism to know that more was in store. And now that we are being shadowed at virtually every keystroke on the Internet for the purposes of targeting advertising, or by those with even worse intentions for us or the health of our computers, once-imaginary creatures from the nightmare lagoons of privacy invasion are beginning to breathe a lot closer to our necks.

Soon after I recently popped up a page for the Lowell Folk Festival, I found a Google ad on my G-mail for a folk act’s concert tour, someone I hadn’t thought about in a long while but whose appearance tempted me for a moment. Some internet marketer was doing their job well, and it was for music, whose cause is just. But the trust we place in Google by utilizing their free services is immense.

The phrase “falling into the wrong hands” comes to mind. And there are plenty of wrong hands out there. Google may be run by Boy Scouts right now but the jingling of doubloons is an inevitably corrupting influence. When nukes fall into the “wrong hands” (as if there are right ones) we worry a lot. When privacy falls into the wrong hands — well, we’re way past 1984 already.

But worthy organizations and businesses have the potential to utilize internet advertising and all its potentially invasive technologies. We don’t ask Google how its high priests work their magic, and Google would not tell us if we did. Advertisers just want to know whether it works, which Google does purport to tell us when we use AdWords.

But now that the cookies are munching us, we are on some level contributing the ruination of the Internet when we purchase such an ad. How much time do people spend either cleaning up their computers from invasive technology or blocking it? I surely don’t spend the time reading every privacy policy I must click to approve, do you?

To varying degrees, advertising has always been an invasion of consciousness. “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco” on the side of a barn took the bliss out of the countryside 80 years ago, but today we’ll tolerate quite a bit more noise than that. The problem is that the technology is starting to stalk us into every corner.

That leaves the possibility that the voice behind it — yours, perhaps — becomes the enemy, and your innocent enough approaches will become unwelcome. It happened with TV, and the clicker became the antidote.

Congress is considering some curbs that, however enforceable, would seek to protect the innocence that remains. For those of us who are not advertising jackals, let’s enjoy that innocence while it lasts.