[KLUG Advocacy] Yahoo tracking your surfing?

[greenproc]

Bruce Smith wrote:

> It appears to say that Yahoo tracks your web surfing, inside and outside
> of the Yahoo network, and shares the information with other companies.
> There is also a link to opt-out of web beacons.
> 
>  - BS

That has been widely known for quite some time.  They claim it to be
browser specific (not user specific), and it seems they would rely on
cookies to do this.  Because cookies are easy to dump (accept session
only and delete when browser exit with firefox and others), I would not
worry too much about cookies.

If you must have the 'personalized preferences' or must sign on to Yahoo
for some reason to get what you are looking for, then you don't have
much choice. How many casual users are likely to be conscious of this
and what it really means? Most individuals who are aware of this
practice, and choose to opt-out, may not realize that this is a browser
specific function.

I've been known to use several computers and yet more browsers in a
single day before noon, and rather than personalizing each browser
instance, my default config is simply to dump and filter as many of
these 'web beacons' as possible, while retaining the functionality that
is desired.  Some sites seem to take forever to load unless you let them
do all the frame-redirections, cookie setting, javascripting things they
want to.

On yet another web surf tracking topic, that there's some *cooky* thing
called intellitext.  My attention was drawn to it while actively
monitoring HTTP traffic while browsing.  It seems that information
regarding keywords you might "hover over with the mouse" while browsing
is sent to a third party server.  I think, but don't know for sure that
this is implemented through a function of javascript and can be
effectively disabled through the use of a filtering proxy.  Does anyone
know more about intellitext?

I'm wondering how much any of this matters considering that websites
track your IP (and probably have limited log-trading agreements with
partner sites). IP tracking is a much more effective method of
data-mining your surfing habits -- at least when it is targeted towards
the single 'home' user.

Now there's an interesting topic of discussion:  How much more
information does your IP combined with data-mining give about you vs.
your browser?