sandramitchell's blog: "Business would like you to accept that and act like good little consumers"

What kills me about some people defending this tracking is that if the federal government was doing it they would be marching on Washington. I suspect a bit of astroturfing. As if business interests were more trustworthy. Sorry folks. I've worked in database driven marketing and it goes way beyond that pair of shoes following you around. Scott McNealy noted back in 2000, "Privacy is dead. Get over it." Business would like you to accept that and act like good little consumers. You can do a few things to throw a wrench in their machinations. The simplest is probably switching to Firefox and installing the Adblock Plus, NoScript and BetterPrivacy (deletes Flash cookies) pluggins. Use FF's built-in cookie management to allow cookies for session only (deletes HTML cookies on quitting). Restart your browser, don't leave it running for days. FF will restart in less time than it takes a webpage to load on most modern computers. IE (not an option for me, as I'm on a Mac), Safari and Chrome are all developed by companies that either directly or indirectly benefit from tracking...use them on sites that don't promote tracking (e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary). If you don't like the thought of remembering passwords across sessions, get a program like 1Password that generates and stores your login information. The passwords it creates are better than anything you are likely to come up with. It integrates with FF, Safari and iCab among others. I'm sure there are Windows equivalents. 1Password can be shared across multiple computers via Dropbox (sync'd between your laptop, desktop and iPhone automagically). When a website requests a login, you click the "1P" button and it's filled in and submitted for you. Not a lot of extra effort there. Or you could move to Europe, where they don't think privacy is dead. Sandra Famous Philanthropists Customer Service Team