Provided
the toaster store keeps your private information private, you??™ve got
nothing to worry about. But can you say the same thing for the other site you
just used to sign up for a free plasma TV?
This is where advertising comes in. Most ads on many web sites originate from
only a handful of companies, and those companies track who??™s looking at their
ads, even when you don??™t click them. If you view a page at a news web site that
displays a banner ad hosted by, say, adknowledge.com or targetnet.com, and
then you sign up to win a free TV on another site that has another ad from the
same agency, that ad server knows you??™ve visited both sites. What??™s more, if
the ad agency is in cahoots with the people who are giving away the TV, they
have your email address, street address, shoe size, and anything else you
typed into the sweepstakes sign-up page.
Now, most folks have dynamic IP addresses, which change every time they start
a connection, but a single IP can remain active all day (or with a router, for weeks
at a time), which means your IP address can be used to track quite a bit of your
online activity. And with a geolocation tool like http://www.yougetsignal.com/,
anyone can find your approximate location. What??™s more, many unscrupulous
sites use so-called tracking cookies to do the same thing??”namely, tag your PC
with a unique serial number that can be read as you visit many different sites.
So, how can you stop the snooping? Most antispyware software (see
Chapter 6) is designed to scan your system and delete any tracking cookies
it finds, but you may want to take it one step further and configure your
browser to not accept any cookies from these sites.
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