Re: Someone is testing my firewall

[ABrady <kcsmart kc rr com>]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2001 13:41:07 +0900 "Karen Ellrick"
<k-ellrick sctech co jp> imparted to us:
> > You become a marketing statistic. More than that, they try tracking
> you,
> > covertly, as much as possible to gather as much information as
> possible so
> > they can sell everything about you that they can gather.
> 
> My question is: how, technically speaking, do they track you?  When
> you
> click the ad, they get whatever info about you that your browser spits
> out,
> but then if you hit the back button or select a URL from your
> Favorites menu
> or by typing it, can they continue to track you somehow, or is that
> the end
> of it?

Cookies. You go to site A and get a cookie from doubleclick. That cookie
stay on your drive, You go to site B and doubleclick sees you are on
site B and you've picked up a cookie from site A. You kill you browser
and go to sleep. Maybe even shut things off. You get back on the next
day, go online, go back to site C and doubleclick sees the cookie. You
then go to sites D, E, F and G, then back to A and B. Doubleclick sees
the same cookie at each site and follows you around.

Simpler than reality, but gets the point across. More than that, they
can target your IP address. If you have an always on connection, the IP
is likely to stay the same (some do, some don't). They get the IP and
that can be used for targeting you and only you with certains ads. Or,
spammers can send directly to an IP address in place of your ISP's
domain (for instance, mine would currently be kcsmart 65 XX XX XX and I
know this can be done because I've tested it). Add that bit of info to
the BCC line in a mailer and it can hide that fact from you when you try
to determine how the mail was addressed.

Again, very simple examples. But why one needs to be careful.

Just a few examples, some older, some recent, of what has transpired and
why:

http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,10588,00.html
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,9261,00.html
http://www.cdt.org/action/doubleclick.shtml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/19700.html
http://www.cdt.org/privacy/guide/start/track.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2439228,00.html?chkpt=zdnntop
http://www.cdt.org/privacy/issues/profiling/
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1562746.html
http://unquietmind.com/doubleclick.html

-- 
I can't remember if I'm the good twin or the evil one.