Displaying items by tag: Cookies

In 2012 ago we heard about a new type of internet tracking that involved making every computer identify itself and then following that ID around. At the time we thought the idea was very interesting. What we did not know was that the technology was already being worked on and ready for testing. The new type of identification was put together after very strict laws were put in place about the use of tracking cookies. Data miners and advertising companies needed a new method to see what you were doing.

Most people are aware of small bits that are used to identify and track your computer on the internet and no, I am not talking about the NSA. We are talking about cookies and there are no end users that I know of that like them. If you look around you will find that there are tons of utilities, applications and plug-ins that will help you avoid or delete cookies from your system. Yet these annoyances (in addition to being more than a little invasive) are still around after more than 15 years. However, there is some potentially good news about this as we hear that Google is looking to move away from the use of third party cookies for tracking your movement on the internet.

Twitter on their blog publicly announced their intent to use "cookies" in the browser, which will be installed on users' computers, and will be used for their monitoring. Of course, the basic idea is that this service will give them data on the habits of users so they could sell them to companies later, who will then be able to create personalized deals.

Although Firefox already supports the "do not track" option for cookies, which informs some advertisers to stop tracking your activities on the web, for version 22 they are preparing options that go a step further. It seems that the popular browser will refuse cookies from third parties by default, typically these cookies are from various advertising networks.