All those cookies your Web developers build into your company’s Web sites may be useless, at least as a means of measuring behaviors. A study by JupiterMedia has concluded that more than half of Internet users delete the cookies dropped on their computers. Fifty-eight percent of users have deleted cookies and 39% delete them monthly from their primary computers. There goes your ability to gather information—at least, via cookies.

While most cookies are harmless, fear is the motivating factor in getting rid of them. It’s time, then, to give up on cookies and look for better ways to measure the effectiveness of our online communication efforts. An article in Internet Week suggests Macromedia’s Flash could be an answer, since a Flash file can track a user each time he visits a site. That’ll work until the word gets out and users find a way to disable this ability to monitor their activities.

Better to apply the more complicated but more credible forms of measurement practiced by people like Katie Paine, which focus more on outcomes than simple page views. In any case, cookies appear to be on their way to becoming another relic on the heap of Internet ideas gone stale.