Yahoo is now using something called “Web Beacons” to track Yahoo Group Users around the net and see what you’re doing and where you are going similar to cookies. Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit.
About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see a link that says web beacons. Click on the phrase web beacons. That will bring you to a paragraph entitled “Outside the Yahoo Network.”
In this section you’ll see a little “click here to opt out” link that will let you “opt-out” of their new method of snooping.
Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the “Success” message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is a “Cancel Opt-out” button that, if clicked, will undo* the opt-out.
By all means opt out of the “web beacons” if you wish, but I think it is well to keep in mind that precisely nothing you do on the internet is private. Every site you visit will have a record of that visit that can be traced back to you if the courts decide it needs to be done. ( U.S.; other countries: Your mileage may vary. ) E-mail is certainly public, unless you use strong encryption, and even that can be broken with sufficient computing power and time.
Also, nothing on the internet ever quite goes away ( almost ). Things get into archives, every indiscreet remark, every fit of pique, and most of it can be found with a simple websearch. Think about that too, before you click “Submit” or “Send”. The future is a funny place, and the rules there aren’t necessarily what they are here.
A useful rule I’ve found in most cases is that if you’d be embarrassed to tell your mother about it, don’t do it on the internet either.
Where you came from is is usually recorded somewhere as well (known as a referrer)…I use this myself (stripped of ip addresses or any identifying identification) to find out interesting new places that link to my site (I had no idea I was so popular in russia and japan!).
It has the side effect of letting me know what search engine queries are driving people to my site.
Weirdly, every month, I get a few hits from Canada where people were looking for “Here We Go Gathering nuts in May”
The kinds of things web-bugs track go away… nobody keeps the logs of every
visit to their site and who read article 94 on Tuesday. They add up the counters
for various kinds of profiling and delete the logs. Being tracked by a web-bug
means some of those counters are specifically corrolated to your ID, so that
a after a year, Yahoo (or whoever) may know that you visited Fuzzy Dice
Emporium no less than 18 times, but Fuzzy Dice Emporium will have cleared
their logs and neither know nor cares (though they’ll keep a record of your
purchase of the neon-green rear view mirror ‘decoration’ you bought…)
Mostly, ad-providers track you for profiling purposes. Of course, if you’ve registered
with Yahoo with your real name, they’d be able to make a bit more corrolation
than most ad servers can.
I purge the cookies from my web-browser every now and again, which essentially
creates a new identiy as far as the web-bugs are concerned. Of course, if you
logged into Yahoo, -their- web-bug could correlate your old cookie and your new
cookie by means of your yahoo id. So you might want to use a different profile for
yahoo. Or purge cookies every time you visit yahoo. You can do more if you’re
really worried about it - simply reject all cookies except the handful you actually
need, or something like that. Some people use a read-only cookies file so they
can navigate certain pages without getting unwanted cookies from ad-servers and
other web-buggers. Choose your level of paranoia, and enjoy.
I grant your points readily, but I was talking primarily about posts to newsgroups and mailing lists, though web pages and blogs put up by individuals probably fall into the same category. These are the sorts of things that are swept up by internet webbots and archived. I wasn’t referring to the sorts of information harvested by web-bugs and cookies.
Website, e-mail, and other traffic logs have been used to apprehend spammers, users of child pornographic sites, and other nefarious types, so the fact that such logs are not kept indefinitely does not completely remove their usefulness in identifying specific persons engaged in specific internet activities. Yes, I know there are other ways of catching them as well, but I’m trying to be brief.
Using the internet is inherently not a private activity. It’s rather more like standing on a soapbox in the courthouse square and delivering a speech.
thanks, gilder, for the info. I have Yahoo DSL both at home and at work. It’s worth trying, even if Big Brother has other means.
The thing I have always wondered about cookies is: what about password accounts? For example, if I throw away all the cookies, will I still have the account with the NY Times for example? Or will I just have to resubmit a password everytime? Same with businesses that I do wish to have accounts with, like eBags? I can’t figure out if I will be losing something that I want in so doing.
depending on the computer - we clear cookies once a week, or once a day. Clear history, too. Yeah - it takes a little bit of time to “log on” to things again, but that’s ok.
Our mayor here in Spokane is in hot water due to some of the web sites he visited, along with things that he did in his private life while a deputy and while a Boy Scout leader.
If Big Brother reads my posts, all they’ll find out is who my favorite singer is and the fact that I hate to work and wish I would win the lottery - which anybody who knows me knows anyway!
