The Advertisers are Watching You 155
pcause noted that the New York Times is running a story about the information being collected about you by internet advertisers. Of course much of this is not news to you, but it's important that the mainstream media is more aware of the issues surrounding this.
Re:That may be... (Score:3, Informative)
Advertising is intended to lie to me. I refuse to spend time listening to known liars.
Re:Mainstrem media attention not "important" or go (Score:3, Informative)
Yet, I can almost guarantee these are the same people who have no problem with the government wiretapping their phones without a warrant, or having a National ID card or any of the other means of tracking and doing away with ones privacy that this administration (and others) have come up with all the name of supposed "security". After all, if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn't worry about the government tracking you or listening in on your phone calls.
So yes, these people are talking out their asses but that doesn't mean the media attention is a bad thing. If it gets people to be more aware of their online privacy, and privacy in general, then this will have been a good thing.
Besides, the easiest way to combat this is to get Firefox or other non-Microsoft browser, and have them auto-delete your cookies and cache every time you close the browser. Problem solved. The advertisers can bite my shiny metal ass if it screws up their ability track and categorize how many people revisit sites. To them, I'm always a new user.
Re:Mainstrem media attention not "important" or go (Score:3, Informative)
I agree it's not a case for more stupid laws, but it needs to be said, to be brought out into the light. The truth is that online advertisers do everything they can to track people online. How many of the regular people are aware of it? Even nerds can miss out. How many of you, faithful Slashdot readers, know about the so called "Flash cookies" [epic.org] and how you're probably being tracked with them right now? Or other insidious tracking methods?
From a tehnical point of view it's easy to dismiss things. They have simple explanations. Browsers should come by default configured with high privacy options. When you install an external browser plugin it's common sense that the plugin may do whatever it pleases. Let's use AdBlock. But these are in no way obvious things for 90% of Internet users. And if someone is watching them wherever they go online I think they should know and learn how to protect themselves.
Use a tracker filter (Score:3, Informative)
stuff (webbugs, tracking scripts, etc.), the "ABP Tracking Filter" [adblockplus.org] (see #3 on the left).
This of course doesn't make you anonymous online at all, but it helps against the worst
offenders and keeps your data out of their DBs.
(Full disclosure: I am a co-author of that list)
Re:Cookies (Score:5, Informative)
I personally use two ways to block this. First is NoScript which is a must have companion to Adblock. Adblock stops the known stuff, NoScript stops the unknown stuff.
Second, on Windows, I deleted the Flash Player folder in Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Macromedia, and created a text file with the exact same name as the folder. This makes the Flash player unable to write any persistent data to disk. However, this does sometimes mess up sites like YouTube which store legit preferences.
Third, I run a utility called ccleaner (used to be called Crap Cleaner) which is great for removing random junk left over in Windows apps.
This is not perfect, but good for most sites. If you want better security, consider running your Web browser in a VM that dumps all changes since a known good snapshot. I do this for some entertainment Flash sites because I don't feel like allowing, even temporarily, all the data mining companies write access to my machine.
Re:Mainstrem media attention not "important" or go (Score:3, Informative)
It seems you are right. I'm not surprised as this kind of cynical lying, but it really is sad nonetheless.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080309-bad-phorm-uk-isps-to-sell-clickstream-data-to-advertisers.html [arstechnica.com]
http://www.badphorm.co.uk/ [badphorm.co.uk]
Here is the letter (Score:3, Informative)