Internet making me nervous

[les45]

I thought I knew how cookies work and why those ads keep popping up, but today I ran into something strange. Just last week I bought a new TV (Nissan Xterra) and we took it camping this week. When I got home, I decided to look on etrailers.com for some things I needed for the camper. Up pops a picture of my Xterra, same color and everything, with suggested accessories that I needed for it. I had previously looked for some accessories for the Xterra online (but not on etrailers.com). This is the first time I have seen my cookies talking to each other. I know some will say to disable cookies or delete history, but then you have to log on every time and I am on a lot of different forums and web sites.
Makes you wonder what Big Brother is really doing with all our online info.

[jstrubberg]

Has nothing to do with big brother.

It's very common for web sites to sell browsing information. They only get pennies per record, but hundreds of thousands of records is a common transaction.

Other companies buy these records to do exactly what you saw. They target advertising because targeted advertising is many times more effective than mass market advertising.

The Internet is not private. It's important to remember that. The only confidentiality you have a right to is whatever you work out with the seller ahead of time.

[Weirdnerd]

If you use firefox, you need to use noScript and adblock plus, as well as a good firewall, you can choose what to share with any website, and you can block scripts on any page....you only share what you want to share.

[legojenn]

Toss in the Ghostery plug in for good measure. Even this site collects data on you. Mike has the Google AJAX Search API installed.