The Wall Street Journal has an interactive report on line about tracking cookies. Visits to the 50 top websites will result in an average of 64 trackers being installed on your computer. These trackers, commonly called "cookies", are little spies that send personal information about your computer activity back to the websites that embedded them in your computer. This personal information is then used by the owners of the website for a number of things. It can be used for things that you might like, such as providing you with more useful or related information associated with your visit to the website.
Spinning that "good" example at bit, such personal information can also be used to target advertising based on your interests. For example, when you buy things on Amazon.com, Amazon obviously has a sales record of those purchases and uses it to provide recommendations to users with accounts at Amazon.com. What if you do not establish an account with Amazon? Well, Amazon still has a sales record of what is purchased with a particular credit card or delivered to a specific address, but that is not helpful in selling you something on when you are browsing around its website. In the Wall Street Journal's report, Amazon is listed as possibly embedding up to 38 cookies on your computer when you visit. One thing that Amazon can do through these cookies is identify the computer that you are using and associate that with your prior purchase and viewing records. When that computer logs into Amazon.com again, Amazon can target items to recommend or advertise, based on past activity.
So "cookies" have a commercial purpose. That can be good or bad, depending on your perspective. More disturbing is the possible "misuse" of this information. When we browse on the web, we may go to many different sites and look at a wide range of information. By receiving back information on where we go and what we view, that information can be processed and patterns revealed. Gradually, over time, this can evolve into a "profile" of the user of the computer.
In some ways, this may be anonymous, if the cookies are only reporting the activity on a particular computer, without a way to tie that information to a particular person. Many of us use the same computer (or computers) repeatedly and perhaps exclusively, and a little bit of personal information provided along the way may establish a personal identity to the data being mined.
Think about your computer usage, particularly the way that it reveals your interests, thoughts and possible personal, social and political views. It may be one thing to share all of this on a social network, like Facebook, where the overt purpose is to enable such sharing. (Then again, there has a been a firestorm of criticism and warning over what Facebook does with the information you post, so you may want to think twice about what you are doing on Facebook.) When your personal likes and interests are being mined by a large number of websites, however, you have to be concerned about the ultimate use of such information.
It would be wise to read the WSJ report and take steps to curtail such mining of personal information.
One thing that you can do is make changes in your Internet settings for your browser and have it refuse cookies. This may cause some difficulties with accessing many websites or features of those websites. Cookies are often used to identify a repeat users of, and preferences for, a website, so that certain features launch automatically rather than making the user open them each time they visit. Blocking cookies could frustrate such features.
Another or additional way to deal with this problem is to install one or more programs that search your computer and identify tracking cookies and other spyware and malware and remove them. One such program is Lavasoft's free program Ad-Aware. I use three computers now (one at home, one at work and a laptop) and all of them run Ad-Adware. (Lavasoft has an upgraded version Ad-Aware pro for $30. Be careful that you get a product from Lavasoft, which may be downloaded from a third-party site, because there are similarly named products out there by other companies.) There are other programs, such as Spybot. It is often recommended that you use at least two different spyware programs for more complete coverage.
