NP A little Privacy Rant (long)

[Paul Mackin]

In fairness to amazon whom I accused of not asking permission to leave a
cookie I had probably already in a previous visit to their site given them
permission to ALWAYS leave a cookie. They never forget.

			P.

On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, Paul Mackin wrote:

> I just visited the url linked to my cookie file (see below) and it 
> contains all sorts of interesting info about what cookies are and how
> used. By the way in order to visit you have to give Netscape permission to
> leave a cookie. (as if they needed permission--amazon didn't even ask)
> 
> 			P.
> 
> On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> 
>