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Cursor Software Tracks Customers

The high-tech gizmo looked innocent enough: a customizable computer cursor that would change from a simple pointer to a Gore 2000 button anytime a Net surfer visited the site.

But the software download that made it possible also tracks the online movements of its users -- a real no-no for a candidate slated to tout the virtues of Internet self-regulation later this week.

"To the best of our knowledge no personally identifiable information was ever divulged," Gore campaign Spokesman Chris Lehane says. "But even this very benign data collection doesn't meet the Gore campaign standard. As a result, once it was brought to our attention it was removed from the Gore 2000 Web site."

Richard Smith, a Cambridge, Mass., computer consultant who first discovered the tracking mechanism last week, says cursor developer Comet Systems Inc. needs to disclose more about what it does online.

"A piece of software get installed on your computer and you go to this site and they know it. It's weird."

Comet Systems Marketing Director Ben Austin says his company designed its Comet Cursor specifically to protect privacy when it first appeared 15 months ago. To date, the company claims some 15 million users at sites including some Time Warner properties and the Comedy Central cable network, where Comet Cursors morph to look like characters featured in its programming.

Austin says Web site operators like the cursor because it gives their visitors something fun to play with. Sites can also customize cursors to encourage users to click on ads; a site featuring a spot for a basketball tournament, for instance, could change the cursor into a basketball.

In return, Web sites can get statistics that measure how many people download the software and which parts of the Web site they visit. A unique ID number separates new visitors from return visitors.

However, Comet does not use that data to assemble dossiers on individual users, Austin says. Revealing more, he says, would invite problems.

"We are not going to create user profiles and we are not going to sell any of this information to third parties," he says.

But, critics answer, Comet could. And no one could stop them.

"They're keeping a detailed database of every visitor," says David Banisar, Washington D.C. attorney and author of The Electronic Privacy Papers. "That's a pretty big database. What happens next week if they decide we're going to go out of business if they don't sell this information to someone?"

What might happen, Banisar asks, if a lawyer in a divorce case subpoenaed the surfing activity of an errant husband?

"In the absence of laws protecting people's information, where's the protection?"

Comet's Austin dismisses Banisar's speculation.

"The rules of privacy and in fact the rules of etiquette are being set in real time," he says. "If the companies don't act responsibly, governments and privacy advocates are going to get involved."

Indeed, they already are -- and with a vengeance.

Consider:

---FTC officials earlier this month held a workshop to discuss the practices of so-called advertising networks that track the movements of Internet users across thousands of sites with electronic tags called cookies.

---Ad networks, responding to pressure from the FTC, Congress and activist groups, launched their own "self-regulatory" Web site (www.networkadvertising.org ) Nov. 8.

Although the sponsors promised users a way to opt out of their services, the Web site as of this writing includes only testimony industry officials offered at the FTC workshop plus a promise to do more.

---Online retailers are looking to this year's Christmas season to help double the $8 billion in online sales they made in 1998. But surveys over the past four years have shown increasing dissatisfaction with the absence of Internet privacy and a resulting reluctance to shop online.

---President Clinton in a radio address Saturday told Americans he would shop online for the first time ever this year. He encouraged citizens to patronize sites that subscribed to self-regulatory principles like those espoused by TrustE, the Online Privacy Alliance and Network Advertising Initiative.

---Other companies like IBM, Compaq and Microsoft have scrapped similar online identifiers in the past when Smith and others discovered they were being used without consumers' knowledge.

In response to the latest controversy, Comet designed a privacy policy for its Web site over the Thanksgiving weekend and posted it Monday morning. The policy pledges not to gather or sell personally identifiable information from Web surfers. Nonetheless, the policy doesn't guarantee officials there won't change their mind.

Comet's Austin says the company will never gather the data critics fear it will.

"That's what everybody says in these cases," Smith says. "The issue is what happens over time. The way companies become valuable is through what they know about people." Building the individual profiles, he says, "is just a matter of changing software at their end."

Reported by USA Today, www.usatoday.com.

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