Our Opinion October 2001

Our Opinion Page for October 2001

Personal Computer Security And The Home User - continued.

Carrying on from last month's opinion page, I'm going to talk about cookies, my opinion on cookies and why you should be concerned about them.

As with everything else about the Internet, you are only as anonymous as you want to be. The sad truth is that revealing any kind of personal information opens the door for that information to be spread.

The nature of a web server allows for the tracking of your surfing habits and other information about you can be gathered with time. While cookies themselves are not gathering that data, they are used as a tracking device to help the people who are gathering that information. As information is gathered about you, it is associated with the value they keep in your cookie. A cookie alone can not read your hard drive and find out who you are, your income or where you live. The only way that information could end up in a cookie is if you provide it to a site and that site saves it to a cookie. It is therefore wise to consider carefully the information you collect and share over the Internet.

A server cannot set a cookie for a domain that it isn't a member of. However, almost every Web user has a cookie from "ad.doubleclick.net" at one time or another, without ever visiting there. DoubleClick and other advertisers have employed a clever solution that enables them to track users and serve content without violating this rule. At one time, Scotsmist subscribed to a media service that placed ads for us. This was accomplished via a simple HTML call to the media service. When a page with an ad was requested, it can return more than just an ad. It can also return a cookie. Or, if it has given the user a cookie previously, it can read that first, and check to see what ad to send. The net result is that the user gets a cookie from the media service without ever having visited it. This usage of cookies is the most controversial, and has led to the polarised opinions on cookies, privacy, and the Internet and is the reason Scotsmist removed such banners from our site.

Doubleclick.net

Subscribers to the doubleclick service put a "cookie request" on their home page for the DoubleClick Cookie. When you visit such a site, it requests the cookie and takes a look to see who you are and any other information in your cookie file. It then sends a request to "doubleclick" with your ID, requesting all available marketing information about you. You then receive specially targeted marketing banners from the site. If you log in to a "doubleclick" enabled site, and it sends a request for your "doubleclick" cookie, and you don't have one, they will hand you a "doubleclick" cookie.
My main concern is that all this is done without anyone's knowledge. I find the gathering of any information invasive to my privacy. What right should anyone have to collect information about me without my knowledge, and why should they break my right to privacy.

Awareness

There's a sense of paranoia involved with cookies, cookies cannot harm your computer or pass on private information such as an email address without your intervention in the first place. Paranoia has recently been sparked by one rumour involving AOL's new software, it claimed that AOL were planning to use cookies to obtain private information from users hard drives. Such hoaxes have not helped the reputation of cookies. However, cookies served by the likes of doubleclick bring on that feeling of paranoia again. Not all cookies are bad, they can also provide useful functions on web pages. For instance, upon your first visit to a given site, you may be asked to reveal your name and perhaps even some personal or financial information required to gain access to that site in the future. The site will then place a cookie containing this information on your system and when you return it will request information based on the cookie to determine who you are and whether you have authorisation to access the site.

Whatever your views on tracking, I have taken to blocking almost everything these days. I have tried many of the manager programs for handling cookies and currently use Opera which allows me to individually handle every cookie and set conditions for handling future cookies. I also use a banner manager and have added doubleclick to it along with other words like ad, sex, valueclick and fastclick. But the best defence of all is awareness. A hardware Router is on order which uses DynamicNAT, has a built in Keyword Filter and comes with a four port switch. It's Netgear's RP114 Web Safe Router and I ordered it on-line from Dabs Direct at a cost of 127 pounds.

Until next month cya in cyberspace.

November's Opinion

September's Opinion