gHacks technology news » tracking cookies http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Protect your privacy from Google AdSense’s new behavioral ads http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/15/protect-your-privacy-from-google-adsenses-new-behavioral-ads/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/15/protect-your-privacy-from-google-adsenses-new-behavioral-ads/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:01:36 +0000 Joe http://www.ghacks.net/?p=11223 Google recently launched behavioral targeted ads for AdSense. This means AdSense displays adverts not only on the context of the webpage, but on the context of your browsing history. The aim is to provide more relevant and efficient adverts, but tracking cookies being used across hundreds of thousands of websites raises obvious privacy issues, as Google can use this information to log website you have been on.

Usually, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is very critical of big corporations who intrude on people’s privacy, but their criticism was not very harsh. Why? Because Google has developed a web browser plug-in that permits users to opt-out of this scheme.

The plug-in is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and modifications to browser preferences in Chrome and Safari also allow people to opt-out. Google also maintains an ‘Ad Preferences Manager‘ which allows this tracking cookie to be disabled until the next time cookies are wiped.

There are several reasons to disable these cookies. Firstly, you may not entrust Google with your details. Secondly, adverts based on past browsing may be displayed to other users of the computer… not perfect if, for example, you were buying a present for a family member and they are suddenly swarmed with advertisements about it!

Most tracking cookies can be disabled if you modify browser settings. In Firefox, for example, in Preferences>Privacy, you can refuse to ‘accept third party cookies’.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/15/protect-your-privacy-from-google-adsenses-new-behavioral-ads/feed/ 17 Firephorm – the anti-phorm Firefox extension http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/14/firephorm-the-anti-phorm-firefox-extension/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/14/firephorm-the-anti-phorm-firefox-extension/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:14:41 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7613 We have covered Phorm before at Ghacks. It is a very scary cooperation between several Internet Service Providers and advertising companies. The Internet Service Providers install tracking cookies on user systems and create a unique profile for each user which is then used by the advertising agencies to display targeted advertisement to the user. Especially British Internet Service Providers seem inclined to make use of Phorm to earn an extra bug. The best way of dealing with such companies would be change to another phorm-free provider as soon as possible. This however is not always possible. That’s when anti-phorm tools come into play. They are also great for the time it takes to transfer the account from one provider to another.

Why is Phorm so dangerous? The tracking is definitely a privacy issue. The user cannot opt out of the tracking and data like search queries and visited websites are stored and analyzed. Since British companies are world renowned for data safety it is only a matter of time before data leaks user profiles.

Firephorm is a Firefox extension that is forging the cookies placed on the system to make the tracking system useless. It provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user.

firephorm

The Firefox extension modifies http requests and response headers and can also warn the user if a webpage request was redirected via Phorm’s webwise.net.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/14/firephorm-the-anti-phorm-firefox-extension/feed/ 3 Why you should restrict Cookie Access http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/24/why-you-should-restrict-cookie-access/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/24/why-you-should-restrict-cookie-access/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:22:47 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5091 Cookies, or more precisely HTTP cookies, are small text files that are stored on a users computer when he visits a website that is making use of them. They can store session information, shopping cart contents, website preferences, can be used for authentication and for tracking the user.

The first applications are beneficial and most of the time necessary to use all of the functions of a website. Blocking cookies on a website that is storing session information in them will have the result that the user is asked for authentication whenever he loads a new page on the server.

Tracking cookies on the other hand do not benefit the user at all unless you would say that targeted advertisement is beneficial. It does not really make sense to enable cookies for all websites, especially those that use them to track the user. It’s more of a privacy issue but one that many users take serious.

Most browsers either come with build in features to enable cookies on a per site basis or provide extensions and add-ons that make it easy to enable cookies only on websites where cookies are necessary for the website to function properly.Firefox users can for instance use the excellent CS Lite Cookie Manager.

Internet Explorer comes with some settings in the Internet Options that can manage cookies effectively has a few options as well but not as man as Internet Explorer.

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