How do cookies become key elements in tracking your web surfing from one one web site to another, when each cookie is just a harmless string of text? Below, I sketch the answer to this question, with the help of a screen photo obtained from the demo. provided by http://privacy.net/. That sketch helps you to see the importance of investing your time to engage in cookie management at your computer keyboard. This article also provides a brief introduction to available cookie management facilities in Internet Explorer, again with the help of screen photos.

Privacy.net's demonstration of the system used to track your web surfing among many sites is excellent and well worth the 30+ minutes you need to go through all the steps. In case you cannot afford that time, I present below a text summary and one screen photo, and related commentary.

A NETWORK OF SITES SERVED BY ONE ADVERTISER

The first basic concept here is that we begin with a network of web sites served by the same supplier of advertising banners, or by a group of different suppliers who agree to share information to promote marketing goals. Let us call this supplier "Big Advertiser". When you are visiting any of the sites in the network, a banner that appears on your screen is very likely to have have come directly from Big Advertiser's computer, and not from the web server of the site that you are visiting.

The second basic concept is that no matter where you go within that network you are 'recognized' by a never-changing ID code that resides in a cookie on your computer..

The third basic concept is that the cookie with the never-changing ID code was put on your computer by Big Advertiser's computer, not by one of the web servers at sites you visit within the network. And Big Advertiser can also do this 'cute' thing -- it can present the cookie so that you do not realize it is coming from Big Advertiser's computer, and not from the one at Your Favorite Site!

Next. your browser must be told by Big Advertiser's computer to keep that cookie on your machine until hell freezes over. Thus the cookie will be one of the so-called "persistent cookies". After you finish your surfing, unless you take specific action to delete that cookie your computer will be recognized by Big Advertiser's computer at every site you visit within the network.

Once that cookie is on your machine, each time you arrive at another site in Big Advertiser's network, your time of arrival, from where you came, and then where you go in detail within this site can be logged and saved to a file at Big Advertiser's computer where you are in glorious colour with your unique ID code. Now if there are 10 Big Advertisers out there, if your browser was originally set up to accept all cookies (something you may not be told when you began to use the browser), by now you will have 10 of these special ID cookies on your machine for all the time you own that machine, and you will have become a Prime Guinea Pig for the snoopers upon personal web surfing. Only your own cookie management will allow you to deal with this issue.

The next screen shot, from the Privacy.net demonstration, illustrates the contents of a file that shows visits I made to fictitious sites it constructed for the demonstration. A real file would also show my tracks within each of the visited sites.

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 WHY ANONYMOUS RECORDS OF WEB TRACKINGS ARE NOT ENOUGH

At this point, you will observe that all Big Advertiser has are records of "web surfing tracks", and you remain anonymous. But not for long, alas.

Submit ANYTHING personal as you "register", "sign up for free goodies", or buy something at any site within Big Advertiser's network and you create the basis for personal information to be attached to the data about your own "web surfing tracks".

"And why would they bother doing THAT," you ask?

Let me answer with a question. Why would the 800-pound gorilla among Big Advertisers borrow billions of dollars to take over another company that had millions of personally identified shopping records, and then announce that it "might have to change it's privacy policy"?

The plain fact is that demographic and life-style profiles must be created with the help of those "web trackings" and that simply can not be done until some personal information is attached to them. That is why those billions of dollars were borrowed, by the 800-pound gorilla, to do the take-over just cited.

Now here is a really 'cute' part of this business.

If you tell Big Advertiser you want to opt out of receiving its cookies, it may arrange things so that you are bombarded with individual cookie admission requests. Their point is that your life will be made most easy by just letting them go ahead and do what they wanted to do in the first place!

And our 800-pound gorilla has got tens of thousands of web sites in its network, so you are going to have a very hard time preventing it from setting up effective tracking of your web surfing unless you are really vigilant in your cookie management!

And this state of affairs will continue as long as millions of people do not know what's being done to them (starting with installing web browsers already pre-configured to "accept all cookies"), or when they know most of them just do not care.

Either of these conditions could exist for a very long time! But it is a cultural thing. Big Advertiser is going to discover that its approach will just 'bomb' in some countries or communities of people, but will be wildly successful in others.

COOKIE MANAGEMENT WITH INTERNET EXPLORER

Internet Explorer comes with built-in provision for you to do cookie management but the functions are quite primitive. With Netscape you have to get an additional program. You will need such a program, in any event, if you want to make the management process as convenient as possible.

Here are some screens and tutorial comments from the Explorer program. Screens from other programs, supported with tutorial commentary, will be provided in future days and weeks. This will be a long process; but there is no way for you to delegate cookie management.

Almost none of the cookies that are sitting there in your computer is there because the sender first explained to you what was the purpose of the cookie, what are its contents and why he/she is asking permission to leave it planted in YOUR computer. Yet you do not want to simply trash ALL the ones you now have, because that creates inconvenience you will want to avoid!

The next screen is here just to remind you how to get to the window where you can manage cookies in Explorer. As shown, you would select Preferences.

In the next screen, look carefully down the list on the left side and find "Receiving Files". You need to select this item,and click on the triangle beside it to open up its possibilities, one of which is "Cookies". That has already been done when this screen was photographed, and that is why you see the "Cookie Settings" portion of the window on the right-hand side.

 Now you can select each cookie by clicking on its name. You will then be able to use the buttons below to delete, view contents, or accept/decline each cookie (unfortunately, declining a named cookie does NOT make an already installed cookie invisible to Big Advertiser's web server program).

The next screen shows you that below the first row of buttons is a menu that gives you four options on how the computer will treat in-coming cookies. These are very basic, and to get more powerful options you need to get a supporting program.

Next week we will show screens and tutorial commentary for two sets of Mac and PC supporting programs.

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