COOKIES

The role of the Marketplace that Sparhawk creates and manages for your organization is to enable your ability to generate additional funding for your programs. Purchases made via a click through from your marketplace to, for example, Amazon.com will generate income only if they can be tracked. To track online transactions for the network, Sparhawk uses cookies placed in advertiser ads or banners. No personal information is captured.

Cookies are OK! They need to be enabled in order for your purchase to benefit your organization. Click here to see how to determine if your cookies are enabled and how to turn them on and off.

Cookies are small files stored on the visitor's computer that record information that is of interest to the advertiser Web site. Cookies are not dangerous and can not be used to steal names, email addresses, phone or credit card numbers. Despite misconceptions, cookies were not created to capture private information of Internet users. In a 2005 JupiterResearch Study, lead analyst Eric Peterson said "For some reason, consumers have identified cookies incorrectly as spyware," he added. "Consumers don't understand what cookies do."

As stated in an August 2005 article by MediaPost:

First, the basic facts: Cookies are not, and cannot become, executable programs, let alone self-executable ones. They are tiny text files, placed on a computer by a Web server and readable only by the server that placed them. Aside from basic anonymous information like browser type and IP address, cookies contain nothing that the user has not voluntarily supplied. They cannot be configured to do more - if they tried, the user's browser would reject them. Cookies are, in fact, no more than the innocent lubricant without which the Web's machinery would come grinding to a halt. In fact, whenever you go online and experience any degree of personalized experience, a cookie is probably responsible. But, unless you have actively provided personal information to the site that placed the cookie on your computer, it can convey none…information gathered is completely anonymous and utterly untraceable to any individual.

Used in the Sparhawk network, cookies have three main functions: to track a sale or lead, to track which publisher made the referral, and to minimize fraudulent transactions. Cookies track information that the consumer voluntarily divulges, and cookies cannot access a consumer's hard drive and steal personal information. The simple function of a cookie is to help consumers navigate a Web site with as little obstruction as possible – with shopping carts for instance. In this respect, the role of cookies as an accurate tracking mechanism is inherent to pay-for-performance advertising.

The MediaPost article reinforces this idea as well:

The immediate beneficiaries of tracking cookies served by ad companies are, it's true, advertisers and publishers. But what does that mean? If advertisers are happy, publishers get paid. And if publishers get paid, they have the money to produce the high-quality content that attracts the visitors to their sites, who in turn attract the advertisers. Site visitors, then, are equal beneficiaries. But without the refinement in targeting made possible by the use of cookies, that advertising would be far less valuable and the quality of the content would inevitably suffer.

Most popular Web sites use cookie technology and in an article by Michelle V. Rafter for Reuters News Service, cookies were analyzed this way, "Without cookies, someone could not, for instance, build a personalized information service such as MyYahoo! to keep track of their favorite stocks or baseball teams."

Currently, consumers can disable cookies on both Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator browsers. According to the JupiterResearch study up to 39 percent of users delete cookies on at least monthly basis.

The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has created an industry standard providing a simple, automated way for users to gain more control over the use of personal information on Web sites they visit.

Sparhawk tracking fully supports the P3P standard. Sparhawk uses cookies for tracking purposes only and no personal data is collected. The privacy of your organizations members is extremely important to us.