I have Cookies up to the Wazoo on my PC and they have NEVER caused me a problem.
If you don't use Cookies, even using this forum must be a pain as the "tracking" Cookie determines which messages you've looked at or not and flags the unread posts appropriately.
That's what I have a Firewall and email anti spam software for.
I use Mailwasher Pro for my email and that lets me choose whether or not to download any emails and also "bounce" spam back to the sender.
I also run an anti-malware program every week, just to make sure everything is O.K. (Malwarebytes, excellent program).
Sandy
Anyone on SingSnap?
Cookies are either enabled or they are not. You have the option of blocking third party cookies but that is the default and nearly everyone does that. So you are getting the same cookies on your computer as everyone else.
Since you believe they are evil, should be illegal, and are there for no good reason, why do you still allow them?
Since you believe they are evil, should be illegal, and are there for no good reason, why do you still allow them?
Given a choice between allowing them or not, I would never allow them ever. If there are sites that have something I want to see or buy, I have to put up with them. Doesn't mean I like them or want them invading my stuff. Are they like death & taxes? Now add cookies to that. 
I have a graduated slide setting for the amount. It's 3/4 of the way up. Some sites want it lowered the entire way down to allow access. WHY? So they can get more of your PERSONAL info.
To do what with? It can't be a good thing. The government probably makes them do it.
I believe the government can do lots of stuff with your computer while you're sleeping. Hence the big lawsuit against Bill Gates. He invented something they wanted and they took it by force. They made his life a living hell until they broke him. Play ball or else....
I have a graduated slide setting for the amount. It's 3/4 of the way up. Some sites want it lowered the entire way down to allow access. WHY? So they can get more of your PERSONAL info.
To do what with? It can't be a good thing. The government probably makes them do it.I believe the government can do lots of stuff with your computer while you're sleeping. Hence the big lawsuit against Bill Gates. He invented something they wanted and they took it by force. They made his life a living hell until they broke him. Play ball or else....
Here is more of what I'm talking about....
Still think everything is OK?
.Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell
On Saturday April 17, 2010, 2:28 am EDT
For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.
A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.
And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).
Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.
The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.
“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”
While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.
“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.
None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or on coupon Web sites, not its own site.
Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.
Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan.
“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,” Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.
The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web page with a simple address at the top of it.
So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010 deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.
RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.
“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s. “There’s some trickery.”
The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback on how well their marketing is working.
Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.
“We break people up into teeny little cross sections of who we think they are, and we test that out against how they respond,” said Mr. Batsford, who is a partner at 31 Media, an online marketing company.
RevTrax can identify online shoppers when they are signed in to a coupon site like Ebates or FatWallet or the retailer’s own site. It says it avoids connecting that number with real people to steer clear of privacy issues, but clients can make that match.
The retailer can also make that connection when it is offering coupons to its Facebook fans, like Filene’s Basement is doing.
“When someone joins a fan club, the user’s Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser,” Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax’s co-founder, said. “We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code.”
“When the consumer redeems the offer in store, we can track it back, in this case, not to the Google search term but to the actual Facebook user ID that was signing up,” he said. Although Facebook does not signal that Amy Smith responded to a given ad, Filene’s could look up the user ID connected to the coupon and “do some more manual-type research — you could easily see your sex, your location and what you’re interested in,” Mr. Treiber said. (Mr. O’Neil said Filene’s did not do this at the moment.)
The coupon efforts are nascent, but coupon companies say that when they get more data about how people are responding, they can make different offers to different consumers.
“Over time,” Mr. Treiber said, “we’ll be able to do much better profiling around certain I.P. addresses, to say, hey, this I.P. address is showing a proclivity for printing clothing apparel coupons and is really only responding to coupons greater than 20 percent off.”
That alarms some privacy advocates.
Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”
Still think everything is OK?
.Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell
On Saturday April 17, 2010, 2:28 am EDT
For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.
A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.
And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).
Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.
The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.
“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”
While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.
“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.
None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or on coupon Web sites, not its own site.
Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.
Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan.
“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,” Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.
The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web page with a simple address at the top of it.
So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010 deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.
RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.
“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s. “There’s some trickery.”
The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback on how well their marketing is working.
Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.
“We break people up into teeny little cross sections of who we think they are, and we test that out against how they respond,” said Mr. Batsford, who is a partner at 31 Media, an online marketing company.
RevTrax can identify online shoppers when they are signed in to a coupon site like Ebates or FatWallet or the retailer’s own site. It says it avoids connecting that number with real people to steer clear of privacy issues, but clients can make that match.
The retailer can also make that connection when it is offering coupons to its Facebook fans, like Filene’s Basement is doing.
“When someone joins a fan club, the user’s Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser,” Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax’s co-founder, said. “We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code.”
“When the consumer redeems the offer in store, we can track it back, in this case, not to the Google search term but to the actual Facebook user ID that was signing up,” he said. Although Facebook does not signal that Amy Smith responded to a given ad, Filene’s could look up the user ID connected to the coupon and “do some more manual-type research — you could easily see your sex, your location and what you’re interested in,” Mr. Treiber said. (Mr. O’Neil said Filene’s did not do this at the moment.)
The coupon efforts are nascent, but coupon companies say that when they get more data about how people are responding, they can make different offers to different consumers.
“Over time,” Mr. Treiber said, “we’ll be able to do much better profiling around certain I.P. addresses, to say, hey, this I.P. address is showing a proclivity for printing clothing apparel coupons and is really only responding to coupons greater than 20 percent off.”
That alarms some privacy advocates.
Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”
Pa. district took 56,000 images on student laptops
By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press Writer Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 24 mins ago
PHILADELPHIA – A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday.
"It's clear there were students who were likely captured in their homes," said lawyer Henry Hockeimer, who represents the Lower Merion School District.
None of the images, captured by a tracking program to find missing computers, appeared to be salacious or inappropriate, he said. The district said it remotely activated the tracking software to find 80 missing laptops in the past two years.
The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported Monday on the large number of images recovered from school servers by forensic computer experts, who were hired after student Blake Robbins filed suit over the tracking practice.
Robbins still doesn't know why the district deployed the software tracking program on his computer, as he had not reported it lost or stolen, his lawyer said.
The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into possible wiretap violations by the district, and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill to include webcam surveillance under the federal wiretap statute.
The district photographed Robbins 400 times during a 15-day period last fall, sometimes as he slept in bed or was half-dressed, according to his lawyer, Mark Haltzman. Other times, the district captured screen shots of instant messages or video chats the Harriton High School sophomore had with friends, he said.
"Not only was Blake Robbins being spied upon, but every one of the people he was IM chatting with were spied upon," said Haltzman, whose lawsuit alleges wiretap and privacy violations. "They captured pictures of people that have nothing to do with Harriton. It could be his cousin from Connecticut."
About 38,000 of the images were taken over several months from six computers the school said were stolen from a locker room.
The tracking program took images every 15 minutes, usually capturing the webcam photo of the user and a screen shot at the same time. The program was sometimes turned on for weeks or months at a time, Hockeimer said.
"There were no written policies or procedures governing the circumstances surrounding activating the program and the circumstances regarding turning off the activations," Hockeimer said.
Robbins was one of about 20 students who had not paid the $55 insurance fee required to take the laptops home but was the only one tracked, Haltzman said.
The depositions taken to date have provided contradictory testimony about the reasons for tracking Robbins' laptop. One of the two people authorized to activate the program, technology coordinator Carol Cafiero, invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions at the deposition, Haltzman said.
About 10 school officials had the right to request an activation, Hockeimer disclosed Monday.
The tracking program helped police identify a suspect not affiliated with the school in the locker room theft, Hockeimer said. The affluent Montgomery County district distributes the Macintosh notebook computers to all 2,300 students at its two high schools, Hockeimer said.
As part of the lawsuit, a federal judge this week is set to begin a confidential process of showing parents the images that were captured of their children.
The school district expects to release a written report on an internal investigation in the next few weeks, Hockeimer said. School board President David Ebby has pledged the report will contain "all the facts — good and bad."
By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press Writer Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 24 mins ago
PHILADELPHIA – A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday.
"It's clear there were students who were likely captured in their homes," said lawyer Henry Hockeimer, who represents the Lower Merion School District.
None of the images, captured by a tracking program to find missing computers, appeared to be salacious or inappropriate, he said. The district said it remotely activated the tracking software to find 80 missing laptops in the past two years.
The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported Monday on the large number of images recovered from school servers by forensic computer experts, who were hired after student Blake Robbins filed suit over the tracking practice.
Robbins still doesn't know why the district deployed the software tracking program on his computer, as he had not reported it lost or stolen, his lawyer said.
The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into possible wiretap violations by the district, and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill to include webcam surveillance under the federal wiretap statute.
The district photographed Robbins 400 times during a 15-day period last fall, sometimes as he slept in bed or was half-dressed, according to his lawyer, Mark Haltzman. Other times, the district captured screen shots of instant messages or video chats the Harriton High School sophomore had with friends, he said.
"Not only was Blake Robbins being spied upon, but every one of the people he was IM chatting with were spied upon," said Haltzman, whose lawsuit alleges wiretap and privacy violations. "They captured pictures of people that have nothing to do with Harriton. It could be his cousin from Connecticut."
About 38,000 of the images were taken over several months from six computers the school said were stolen from a locker room.
The tracking program took images every 15 minutes, usually capturing the webcam photo of the user and a screen shot at the same time. The program was sometimes turned on for weeks or months at a time, Hockeimer said.
"There were no written policies or procedures governing the circumstances surrounding activating the program and the circumstances regarding turning off the activations," Hockeimer said.
Robbins was one of about 20 students who had not paid the $55 insurance fee required to take the laptops home but was the only one tracked, Haltzman said.
The depositions taken to date have provided contradictory testimony about the reasons for tracking Robbins' laptop. One of the two people authorized to activate the program, technology coordinator Carol Cafiero, invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions at the deposition, Haltzman said.
About 10 school officials had the right to request an activation, Hockeimer disclosed Monday.
The tracking program helped police identify a suspect not affiliated with the school in the locker room theft, Hockeimer said. The affluent Montgomery County district distributes the Macintosh notebook computers to all 2,300 students at its two high schools, Hockeimer said.
As part of the lawsuit, a federal judge this week is set to begin a confidential process of showing parents the images that were captured of their children.
The school district expects to release a written report on an internal investigation in the next few weeks, Hockeimer said. School board President David Ebby has pledged the report will contain "all the facts — good and bad."
Cookies cannot be used to steal information like your credit card numbers or social security number. They cannot be used to infect your computer with a virus. Some people have issues with anything other than total anonymity and so the anti-spyware programs list the "tracking cookies" as a threat. You'll notice that they are never categorized as a "high" or "severe" threat.
The fact is that the majority of cookies are perfectly harmless and actually very useful. To make a blanket statement that all cookies should be made illegal is asinine.
The fact is that the majority of cookies are perfectly harmless and actually very useful. To make a blanket statement that all cookies should be made illegal is asinine.
Cookies do not TAKE any information. They store information that you give them either directly or indirectly. But nothing is stored there that would allow someone to steal your identity. Your address and phone number are not stored in a cookie.
You know, they are actually only text files. You can open any of them with Notepad and see what they contain.
Is there cookie abuse? Do you know of any worthwhile technology that has not been abused?
You know, they are actually only text files. You can open any of them with Notepad and see what they contain.
Is there cookie abuse? Do you know of any worthwhile technology that has not been abused?
If the cookies don't store names and addresses....why are sites asking to turn on cookies before you can put items into a shopping cart or enter the Publishers Clearing House contest. All the info lines are already filled in with your name, address and phone number and credit card info as soon as you open the site.wiseguy wrote:Cookies do not TAKE any information. They store information that you give them either directly or indirectly. But nothing is stored there that would allow someone to steal your identity. Your address and phone number are not stored in a cookie.
You know, they are actually only text files. You can open any of them with Notepad and see what they contain.
Is there cookie abuse? Do you know of any worthwhile technology that has not been abused?
If the cookies aren't enabled you can't get in and they don't know your stuff.
That information is stored in the website's database and not in the cookie. The site knows you are there because a cookie contains your IP address. The site then displays your information from the database.Bigdog wrote:If the cookies don't store names and addresses....why are sites asking to turn on cookies before you can put items into a shopping cart or enter the Publishers Clearing House contest. All the info lines are already filled in with your name, address and phone number and credit card info as soon as you open the site.
If the cookies aren't enabled you can't get in and they don't know your stuff.
Your IP address is the only way a cookie identifies you. Your computer has it's own unique IP address ...BUT... that IP address can not tell them who you are. Only you can do that.
Then all sites should require the same amount of cookie access. Some sites are fine with my high cookie setting and some require more access (a lower setting.) WHY?
My IP address isn't any longer or shorter from site to site. SOMETHING else is going on. How big of a cookie does it take to contain an IP address and only an IP address?
Just like text messages are hidden in between phone calls. That's how small they are.
A cookie isn't the same cookie for everyone. It should be. It's not.
My IP address isn't any longer or shorter from site to site. SOMETHING else is going on. How big of a cookie does it take to contain an IP address and only an IP address?
Just like text messages are hidden in between phone calls. That's how small they are.
A cookie isn't the same cookie for everyone. It should be. It's not.
