NP A little Privacy Rant (long)

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Spencer Thiel wrote:
> 
> This is almost but not quite right.  The cookie from, say, DoubleClick, is 
> placed on the hard drive when the user first loads the page.  They don't 
> have to click on anything.

Just to illustrate what opening up amazon.com does to your hard drive:
(I'd previously erased all the existing cookies)

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html
# This is a generated file!  Do not edit.

.netscape.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	1293840290	UIDC	168.143.28.6:0962973008:171964
.amazon.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	963561890	session-id	104-4583839-6163919
.amazon.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	963561890	session-id-time	963561600
.amazon.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	2082787491	ubid-main	077-3027796-1139529
.amazon.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	2082787491	x-main	eKQIfwnxuF7qtmM40x6VWAXh at Ih6Uo5H

> 
> >Q:  What does Joe's Golf Emporium now know about Bob?
> >A:  Abso-f*cking-lutely nothing, other than his IP address, which may or may
> >not be consistent from session to session, and maybe the fact that he came
> >from Yahoo, because that's the address in the referral URL.
> 
> This is just flat out wrong.  Much information can be determined -- even 
> before the stupid cookie is placed on Bob's computer, like area code, zip 
> code, state, etc.., just from the IP address.  Just because you don't know 
> how to read an IP address, it doesn't mean that other's don't.  DoubleClick 
> and almost any other on-line advertising agency advertises that you can use 
> their system to target ads by all sorts of categories -- pretty much 
> everything except your sex, weight, and height.  But if you were suckered 
> in to entering this information in to a web site when you registered, they 
> can take care of this also.

Question for Spenser or Jeannie:

My IP address is 168.143.28.6 (static). What can amazon.com tell about me.
They can find the name of my computer of course. They log on to it if they
have any of my passwords. But what else can they do. Can they look at my
cookie file (as shown above) and see all the other sites I've visited?

Curious.

			P.