Because a web connection is not a permanent connection, it is necessary for web developers to use tricks to make it seem like the connection is permanent. Oftentimes this is done with cookies. These are little files that hold some basic information about your interaction with a particular website. They are necessary in order to make the web experience the one you've come to expect. Cookies got a bad reputation when sites started creating super cookies that would contain information from several sites you visited and started to tell more of your story than yo might have wanted. Then hackers started reading cookies from other websites to gather information about you. This led to the cookie craze that had everyone deleting their cookies after each web session. It generated features in web browsers that restricted which cookies a site could see.
Devoted web developers worked around this by creating another kind of marker to place on your machine. These little snippets of code are generically called Bugs. They aren't talked about as much, but they are every bit as information rich as cookies ever were. Most Web 2.0 sites use bugs, as does Google Analytics and many shopping sites. You can find details about web bugs from a site set up by UC Berkeley.
When my Indianapolis small business computer support customers ask me what they can do about increasing their privacy online, I have to tell them "not much." Sure, there are obvious things like staying away from strange sites, and avoiding random links. But the reality is that the rich web experience we've come to take for granted is only possible by allowing web sites to collect information about us in the background. Most of the data is not dangerous or threatening. Yet when pulled together, they can tell a lot about a person. In my Air Force days, these were called EEFIs (Essential Elements of Friendly Information). Collect enough of these and you get a pretty good profile of a person or organization.
Devoted web developers worked around this by creating another kind of marker to place on your machine. These little snippets of code are generically called Bugs. They aren't talked about as much, but they are every bit as information rich as cookies ever were. Most Web 2.0 sites use bugs, as does Google Analytics and many shopping sites. You can find details about web bugs from a site set up by UC Berkeley.
When my Indianapolis small business computer support customers ask me what they can do about increasing their privacy online, I have to tell them "not much." Sure, there are obvious things like staying away from strange sites, and avoiding random links. But the reality is that the rich web experience we've come to take for granted is only possible by allowing web sites to collect information about us in the background. Most of the data is not dangerous or threatening. Yet when pulled together, they can tell a lot about a person. In my Air Force days, these were called EEFIs (Essential Elements of Friendly Information). Collect enough of these and you get a pretty good profile of a person or organization.
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