Our Presentation!

Alright, just got finished using a pretty cool and new piece of software called Prezi and made our presentation. Very excited to see how this goes when we present it and hopefully it will be better than a boring powerpoint presentation. Enjoy!

Cookies on Prezi

New Look

Made some aesthetic changes to the blog to make it look a little cleaner. No more tiled photo of some random forests! Still not sure about the colour though.

Google and DoubleClick

Here's a bit of info on the DoubleClick cookie:

http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ads/#toc-doubleclick

The Project Video Has Landed!

The video is online!

As well, a new page explaining cookies in easier terms, "Cookies Simplified" has been added to the top-right 'Pages' section!

Please comment on our video or our blog, your comments and opinions matter to us!

Project Video

A long night working on the video portion of our project. It is coming along nicely with only a few technical bumps still left to iron out such as proper video editing and uploading it to YouTube in decent quality. In the end, it was a great day for teamwork today and we got a lot done! All that is left now is getting the video finished and getting ready to present our findings. 

Good job everyone!

Response to Feedback

I thought I'd go over our plans to address the feedback we've gotten so far on the Research and Document portion of our project, and how we plan to change our production to accommodate some of these ideas. 

 
-”Provide a personal opinion on the risk/reward aspect of cookies. In particular, if marketing research and personalized ads are worth sacrificing your digital fingerprint, regardless of whether it can be traced back to you personally.”   

We plan to conclude with many of these points in the video, adding what the risks of cookies are to the average user, and how they can be prevented or dealt with if privacy is a big issue. This section will be titled, "The Sacrifice of Cookies", or something similar.

-Include a conclusion or result in the documentation

As stated, the conclusion of our video will explain some of the results of our research. We will make suggestions to user on how to control cookies, explain how to manage cookies given the information presented, by manually removing files or using specific software designed to remove cookies successfully.

 

- Want to see more diversity in the sites you analyzed. try an email site, a banking site, e-commerce site
    

Many different examples of websites using cookies will be given, and the various uses of these for each site will be explained as they are reached in the video. This will come about by the examination of the folder of cookies using cookie analyzing software, and the analysis of sessional cookies on a specific web site. 

- Comparing how different browsers use cookies is cool, but what about a comparison of operating systems? “see if mac cookie threats are the same as for windows and linux”

A section of research of the final project will be dedicated to explaining the difference in both browsers and operating systems, which will be quite simply titled: "Operating Systems and Browsers".

-project needs to be more engaging. consider a youtube video or a podcast. this could help generate comments.

Our main form of production for the 'produce' phase of the project is a YouTube video, as clearly stated in both the proposal and the Research and Document files...

New Group Blog

New blog started for the group, figured it would be a good way to allow everyone to post what they have been doing in the group during the duration of the project. Also I am just curious to see how having multiple authors on a blogger blog works out!

Was thinking today that it may be useful to take a tally of the cookies that we find and where they come from and what they are after. Then at the end we can combine the data and make some nice pie charts that show what the majority of the cookies are doing and from what popular sites you'll get the most of them from. Then based on the information pulled by the most common cookies we can make a conclusion whether or not people should be concerned about them.