The Sitting Tree

Apparently Google has jumped on the bandwagon of targeting ads based on what you do online. This involves tracking your every move on Internet websites and storing them as cookies on your browser. They devised a way to opt-out of the program via a cookie, but this is not really that great, since most people who care about their privacy regularly delete their cookies anyway.

Google has apparently created an opt-out plugin for most browsers which they have made available as an open-source project on Google Code. This satisfied my concern that Google could potentially put malicious code into the plugin in order to spy on users. After examining the source however, it seems that all the plugin does (at least in Firefox) is check to see if the cookie is there when you load the browser. If the cookie is not found and third party cookies are not disabled, then it adds the opt-out cookie.

This solution is still not really satisfactory to me because you really have no way of knowing exactly what Google is doing when it sees that cookie. It is similar to the robots.txt file in web servers. It provides to web spiders a list of files which they are not allowed to go through. In other words, it is telling the web spiders the files you do not want it to know about, making the point moot, because it can then choose not to obey and spider through all your hidden, but publically available files.

I always turn third party cookies off anyway because I don’t believe they have any place on my browser. When I’m on a website I am on, I am on it to see that website’s content, not to have information placed on my computer by third party sites. I suggest you do the same, and I also suggest the Cookie Culler addon for Firefox as a way to selectively remove cookies from your system, as well as the Ad Block Plus addon, for getting rid of the majority of ads in the first place. It even blocks Snapshots, which I use here. Heh.

Users of Apple’s Safari web browser will also be happy to find that there is an Adblock plugin for Safari 3, as well, that uses the same filters as the Firefox plugin.

If you get Adblock Plus and do not want the Snapshots plugin to be blocked, you can find instructions on how to remove it from Adblock’s list at Snap’s Frequently Asked Questions page.