All Pop Ups are Evil

They are part of the global hegemony trying to finagle money out of you against your will.  All of the collection of data only serves to further embolden these people into making inroads into your privacy with only one motive – profit – theirs.

They may say things like we use this information to make our services better for you.  And they may even believe that.  But the problem is that there are plenty of people out there who do not care an iota about you or your values.

So beware. 

The commercialization of the internet is not a good thing for individuals.  While a business entity has a right to a legitimate profit, one gained through deceptive business practices needs to be stopped.  And deceptive business practices needs to be expanded to include any attempt to link to your computer to assist them in their efforts.  If my computer resources are used by an advertising entity or data mining firm, then I should be rewarded monetarily for my contribution.

You can not assume that any site will not place unwanted tracking cookies on your computer.  The problem is insidious.  Any large search engine or portal will become under attack from unscrupulous or self serving corporate interests.

Do not expect or even desire help from the government in this instance.  While they can be a good guard against someone’s outright lies to obtain money from you, they can not determine the monetary value of the information that you contribute to the growth of the organism known as the web.

An individual must stand guard over his or her own privacy in this instance.  There are lots of things you can do to protect yourself.  Each of them carries with it a degree of inconvenience.  But vigilance is of utmost importance.

Here are some things you can do:

• Set your browser to block all ‘cookies’ and prompt for your acceptance of them.
• Deny any commercial entity from setting a cookie
• Run AdAware or similar software on a periodic basis to eliminate any ‘cookies’ that have in some way learned to avoid the browser’s screen for them.
• If you have a relationship to a website that has a forum for example and gives you the opportunity to save your settings by installing a cookie, check their privacy policy before automatically selecting ‘yes’.  They may have signed up with a tracking service as a way to improve their revenue stream.  They should tell you that up front.  If they do, then it is up to you to choose to accept that convenience.  If this offends you, write an email and tell them that you would prefer the choice of a cookie that stores your information without being subject to the data collection.  If they do not move to fix this, my advice would be to forgo the convenience.
• If a company states in its privacy policy that they do not allow third party data mining and yet you get notices that ‘cookies’ are going to be installed and those ‘cookies’ are not from the web site itself, make a note of them and forward the names and/or urls to the site.  Any legitimate business wants to know if they are being co-opted without consent by another business.  This is the true parasite.  I have found companies to be on the alert for this kind of thing.

Ultimately it should be up to legitimate businesses to police their own.  It is ironic in a way for business to itself come under attack by other businesses.  If business interests oppose individuals seeking government help in preventing deceptive practices we should point out their hypocrisy if they turn to the government for redress when they are the ones being attacked.

Last update: 4/24/2003; 5:40:01 AM.