ITinfo: Web Bugs Thwart Privacy: Worse than Cookies

Your Tracked By Invisible Images

Tiny web bugs work with cookies, tell advertisers what you're up to

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Web Bugs Thwart Privacy: Worse than Cookies

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Just yesterday I got excited about Microsoft's announcement that future versions of Internet Explorer would be able to cut out 3d-party cookies; a feature that's already included in the Opera web browser. Today, I'm blind sided by a new revelation that web bugs, 1-pixel transparent gif images, are being used by online advertisers to track you and me on the net: which sites, when we visit them, in what order we visit--all the items that are nobody's business by our own.

Like cookies, web bugs are electronic tags that help Web sites and advertisers track visitors' whereabouts in cyberspace. But Web bugs are invisible on the page and are much smaller in file size, which makes them load quickly an unobtrusively.

It's kind of like setting out a trip wire. The web bugs send a ping back to the advertiser's server every time we load a page that contains one, and the advertiser records that our computer just loaded that page. Well, I don't want to be tripped up, and I don't want to be trailed on the net.

Web bugs can "talk" to existing cookies on a computer if they are both from the same Web site or advertising company, such as DoubleClick, which uses bugs and dominates the online advertising market.

Ok, here's the real rub, More than a year ago, I reported that DoubleClick purchased Abacus Direct, the company that specializes in offline database marketing: magazine subscriptions, mailing lists, addresses, phone numbers, lots of personal identification information. Now, along comes DoubleClick again, fresh from losing an online privacy fight over invasive cookies, and it's using the web bugs to do it's dirty work again.

The Web bugs do the tactical work, the cookies are running the strategic operations, and DoubleClick is waging war by matching up your online activities with Abacus Direct's mail order lists so your online and offline habits are synched. Now do you get the picture?

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References

Microsoft
Opera
Message Center

Microsoft Internet Explorer to Cut Cookies
DoubleClick Moves Into Database Marketing

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