Cookies, Web Profilers, Social Network Cartography and Proxy Servers

Abstract

LATELY I have been vacillating between worrying about my online privacy and saying to myself, why worry? The balance beam, however, is beginning to tip toward the start-worrying side. The rest of this column may help you decide how you stand on this issue. Lest we forget, the Internet was designed as an open system that promoted the two-way flow of information. In other words, everything that is sent has a return address called an IP or Internet Protocol address of the form: 000.11.222.33. Whenever you connect to a website, the site learns your IP address. It also learns the type of computer you are using, the version of the operating system you are running, and the type of browser software you are using. If you open one site and connect to another site from it, the second site knows the referring site. In addition, any advertiser on a site usually learns all this information. With your IP address, it's a simple matter to determine your exact latitude and longitude. Then it's possible for people to link this information to your Web-surfing habits, your personal interests, your home address, where you shop online, and what you have purchased. Most of the above information is exchanged by computers because of Web browser cookies. A cookie is a small piece of information a remote website stores on your computer. Your browser keeps a log of these little cookies in a file folder of the same name. You can easily do a Find command and search for the location of this folder. To look at its contents, simply open the file in any word processor. Here is an example of a rather harmless cookie I found on my Mac. Notice that the cookie was sent on 13 August 2004 and will expire on 28 October 2004. (See the bold print.) Reputable sites place cookies on your machine that expire in a reasonable amount of time; others, however, expire on dates such as the year 2038. Domain www.iprive.com Expires 2004-10-28T18:52:38Z Name message Path /cgi-bin/check Value you have visited iPrive.com on 8/13/2004 Some cookies are very helpful. For example, they can sign you onto the New York Times website, help you review your itinerary at Travelocity, let Amazon.com offer book suggestions, and help track the bids you have made on eBay. Other cookies send information about you to places where you might not want it to go, like webtrendslive.com, adserver.com, about.com, and spylog.com. It seems logical to use your Web browser's Preferences menu to turn off the receipt of cookies or have your browser ask you before accepting a cookie. If you try either of these options, you will be blocked from reaching many sites, or you will be constantly interrupted by the incessant asking. Apple's Safari browser has an interesting cookie preference that accepts cookies only from sites that you navigate to (not from advertisers on those sites.) This is a good preference to choose. I could not find the equivalent setting in Internet Explorer. Another way your information can become part of a variety of databases is through the activity of a profiler. A profiler is a company that links your IP address to one or more huge databases of surfing or shopping information. Consider this item from MacWorld over four years ago. Take the example of DoubleClick, a very popular profiler many companies (including MacWorld) have used. It became the focus of legal and media scrutiny for privacy invasion after it bought a direct-mail database called Abacus Direct last year. The Abacus purchase gave DoubleClick the ability to take profiling a step further. …