Spybot Deleting Affiliate Cookies

[somegamer]

There are some interesting posts regarding Spybot deleting (and perhaps singling out) affiliate marketing cookies from AzoogleAds and Commission Junction. Props to Andrew Wee and Shoemoney for pointing them out:

Spybot - Affiliate Marketing Menace (http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/220/spybot-affiliate-marketing-menace/)
Spybot Washing AzoogleAds Cookies (http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/12/11/affiliate-monday-spybot-washing-azoogleadsdoubleclick-cookies-flycell-cj-who-is-ripping-off-who/)

Care to explain what's going on?

[PepiMK]

has now identified several affiliate network tracker cookies as ’spyware’.

That's quite funny, regarding that this happens since... hmm... if I would guess, I'ld say at least 3 years. Probably langer ;)

Also, if you just open the description panel at the right, you'll clearly see it identifies them as "Tracking cookie", not as "Spyware".

The comments about Alexa and Adaware being better are also quite misleading, if one looks at the past and that it was Adawares policy of - even under a wrong label - detecting something named "Alexa" that forced every other company to detect it as well to not get overrun by customers complaining that they wouldn't detect something that Adaware detects on EVERY machine even.

[bitman]

Personally, I don't bother using Spybot to delete Tracking (Third-party) Cookies, since that's basically a useless pursuit and way too limited to be useful. I've been blocking all Tracking Cookies using the Internet Explorer 6 browser since I discovered the ability over a year ago. In fact, most popular browsers have had this ability for some time now.

Why do other anti-spyware applications detect so many more tracking cookies? (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/faq/37.html)

If the affiliate marketing (read pyramid) schemes are really still depending on this archaic system, it's likely that many of the clicks are never being registered, so those of you depending on these schemes to make money are being fooled.

Bitman