NP A little Privacy Rant (long)

[Spencer Thiel]

At 01:04 PM 7/7/00 +0000, Paul Mackin wrote:


>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?

I'd recommed everyone who's interested to read the following:
<http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/>

As Jeannie already pointed out, there is really very little in the way of 
harmful actions that can be taken via cookies.

However, cookies are also huge security holes if you know what you are 
doing. From the same site: 
<http://www.peacefire.org/security/iecookies/>.  To directly answer Paul's 
question, yes, someone can see all the other sites that you have visited, 
if they are so inclined.

If you are really concerned, I'd recommend getting the Opera browser at 
http://www.opera.com.  The browser will inform you when illegal cookies are 
being placed on your machine, or any cookie for that matter, and you can 
set up cookie filters if there are web sites you absolutely don't want on 
your machine.  IE and Netcape offer the abililty to turn cookies off, but 
that's not really a feasible option since cookies are used on so many sites 
in useful ways.
- st.