For a while now, I’ve been using options in Firefox and IE to prompt me before accepting cookies from web sites. Boy, am I surprised to see what goes on …
I would highly recommend that everyone try this and see for themselves. In Firefox 2, use Tools -> Options -> Privacy, check the “Accept cookies from sites” box and select “Ask me everytime” for the “Keep Until” option. In IE 7, use Tools -> Internet Options -> Privacy, select the Advanced button, check the “Override automatic cookie handling” box, select the Prompt option for First party and Third party cookies, check the “Always allow session cookies” box. In both Firefox and IE, there are buttons to clear all cookies, use that to delete all existing cookies. Now sit back and watch the fun!
While I do not generally have a problem with first party cookies that serve a functional purpose (like holding your shopping cart at an e-commerce site), I find third party cookies that track your every move extremely offensive. I’ve come to detest companies like Hitbox that make huge sums of money off data collected in a very shadowy fashion. What is really scary is that when I heard a guy from Hitbox speak at a recent conference (see previous post), he was talking about how they knew the demographics of the people accessing various sites, how many kids they had, their family income and so on – loads of personal data – they are using this personal data in combination with people’s surfing habits to sell all sorts of analysis. Talk about big brother watching …
If you want to personally do something about this – use the browser settings described above to avoid any unwanted cookies (IE has a handy setting to automatically reject third party cookies – but some of them now circumvent this and act like first party cookies) and also clear all cookies periodically (Firefox has a handy option to do this automatically every time you close the browser).