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FENDING OFF THOSE PESKY SNOOPSYou're 55 years old, you make $50,000 a year, and you've been surfing the Web for athletic-shoe supports. Suddenly, Amazon.com starts urging you to buy safe-sport guides for aging joggers. Even more irksome, CDnow Inc. is recommending you buy '60s oldies by such artists as Iron Butterfly. Jeez. It's bad enough CDnow thinks you're a heavy metal fan. Do you really want these sites to know your salary, your age, and all about your fallen arches? The trouble is, most of them already do. Consider ''cookies,'' the deceptively sweet name for software that's downloaded into your PC's hard drive, usually without your knowledge. Sent by online merchants, advertisers, and Internet services, they quietly record your Web habits. Each time you visit a site, cookies are uploaded for review by the people who put them there, so they can pitch you products you may find too good to pass up. Some cookies simply track what you read and buy on a single Web site. But more powerful software, called ''tracking cookies,'' follow you everywhere. These hard-drive super-snoops, often used by advertisers, let marketers combine data from the cookie on your hard drive with the personal information you volunteer when filling out registration forms. Armed with such profiles, cybersalesmen may be able to get at your credit-rating, salary, and lifestyle. BLOCKERS. What to do? You can block cookies entirely, using the preference settings in the pull-down menus of the two leading browsers, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Or you can curb their snooping. With Netscape Navigator 4.0, you can set preferences so that your browser accepts only cookies that get sent back to the ''originating server''--no more tracking cookies. The result: E-merchants and services are kept from tracing anything you do beyond their site. And there are other ways: Software, such as Kookaburra Software's Cookie Pal ($15), lets you list sites from which you'll accept cookies. And for $60 a year, Netizens can subscribe to The Anonymizer, a San Diego-based service that lets you surf the Web and send E-mail anonymously. Some Net marketers argue that as long as your real name, address, and phone numbers are protected, it's impossible to overly intrude. ''We don't need to know who a person is to customize the experience,'' says Dan Jaye, chief technology officer of Engage Technologies Inc., which sells anonymous user profiles to online marketers. Over the past five months, Engage has amassed a database of 38 million user profiles, which it sells to advertisers and E-retailers. Jaye says these ''can't be used to track you down. If the government subpoenaed our database, we couldn't tell them who you are.'' For those still worried, Engage is developing ''trust labels,'' which reject any cookie that marketers or advertisers use to expose a Web surfer's real identity. Engage demonstrated the tool to the Commerce Dept. in June, and Netscape may add it to the next version of its browser, due late this year. But the most ambitious privacy effort so far is called the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). Software companies are working on a P3P standard that would let cybernauts choose how much personal information to disclose. Under the plan, cybernauts--by setting their browser preferences--may choose to block out everything or agree to disclose only some data, such as their zip code and gender. Progress is slow, however, so consumers may have to wait a while for relief. Until then, the best advice might come from your mom: Don't accept cookies from strangers.
By Paul C. Judge in Boston RELATED ITEMS
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Updated Sept. 24, 1998 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1998, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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