Online privacy is huge these days.
Google (Google Chrome) and Mozila (Firefox) will soon be helping you from being tracked on the web.
Currently your browser (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, you name it) when they visit a website they save a “cookie” this cookie stores semi-personal information. Such as login id, when you logged in, and other basic information.
But advertisers on those websites also store cookies. Those cookies follow you around where you go. So if you visit arstechnica, engadget, sony, reddit, filehippo, you name it you are followed around.
A common tracking cookie is from Google. Google Adsense. Its part of their advertising network. It stores some pretty personal information. Including the websites you visited, which ads you clicked, what you “into” and etc etc.
To view what Google has on you view there opt-out page.
Thankfully privacy invading cookies can be deleted (clear your cookies, and cache) but they do come back.
The solution is opt-out cookies. These cookies tell the ad networks to not store your information and as such do not personalise your ads. So you will get very generic ads.
To see which ad networks have cookies stored and how to opt-out visit ad choices.
Google chrome has a new add-on to automatically do this for you. Its called Keep My Opt-Outs.
Mozilla firefox is planning to introduce a “DNT header” aka a DO NOT TRACK header. This tells advertising companies to not store cookies. A simpler solution. For the mean time firefox users search for the add-on called “better privacy”.
It is rumoured that IE9 will also have privacy tools.
I do not care how much information advertisers track my personal information. Because I have nothing to hide. But no matter how personal it gets the ads dont seem to change much so I dont see the point.
What is your stance? Are web-cookies invading our privacy so much that we need to push back?
