Marketed to death


Most of us have need to ship equipment from time to time. FedEx has always prided themselves with their efficiency and speed, until this morning.

http://www.fedex.com/us/

I spent over an hour at their new web site. This due to new marketing cookies they are planting on our browsers. I am in the habit of checking to see what has been put on mine. When I saw the three from "doubleclick", I erased them.

When time came to print my manifest, the security function on Microsoft Internet Explorer crashed my computer.

Any Audiogon members that have occasion to use FedEx Internet Ship should be aware of this. Better yet, call and complain that instead of tracking our browsers they should be tracking our packages.
128x128Ag insider logo xs@2xalbertporter
FedEx has been a nightmare for me to deal with. Since I became a member about 5 weeks ago, I've spent about 6 hours on the phone with my FedEx rep and others just trying to schedule for 3 pickups.

Tremendous disorganization.

I believe their handling sensitivity and pricing are better than UPS, but at what cost?

-IMO
I have to say the I have been completely satisfied with FedEx and have never had a problem. UPS on the other hand has proven to be an acronym for Unusually Poor Service.
I am sad to hear you have had a problem with FedEx but I refuse to use UPS and I even pay more when buying to assure FedEx delivery. Good luck in the future.
Albert - nearly everyone out there tracks browser usage, so attacking FedEx for this is just tilting at windmills. Many sites plant site cookies not to track browser usage, but to store information about what you were interested in when you last visited that site, and use that info to tailor your next visit. In many cases, its completely benign and is done as a convenience for the customer. Doubleclick, however, is in the business of tracking your web browsing and I, like you, tend to remove these cookies when I discover them. Unfortunately, the doubleclick ads bring in revenue for the site, and as such tend to show up a lot on the web.

There are things you can do to protect yourself if you're concerned about having your browser usage tracked. Unfortunately, IE doesn't provide much in the way of convenient protection, so I use one of the Mozilla variants instead (Mozilla 1.2, Netscape 7, Phoenix*, Chimera) that allow you to selectively block cookies from domains you want to avoid (like ad.doubleclick.com). Not a huge amount of protection from the zillions of cookies out there, but at least I can stop the most pervasive ones.

Sadly, with respect to having our web usage tracked, catalogued, and analyzed, I think we've pretty much already lost the battle. But, I like to keep up the fight anyway, if only for show ;-).

Ken

* Phoenix is my browser preference. You can find it at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-release-notes.html