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• Cookies!

  Cookies are small little text files which websites place on your hard disk in order to track where you have been. Sites can store just about anything they want in the file and when you connect, the information can be queried by other sites. Banner Ads are notorious cookie writers. If you use Netscape, edit the file "Cookies.TXT" and you can see what and where you've been. It's actually kind of interesting to look at.
  
  If you want to see how many cookies pass through your system, try this experiment: In Netscape, select Edit, Preferences, Advanced and select "Accept all Cookies" and "Warn me before accepting." (IE will have similar menus.) Next, go for a drive on the web and notice how often you need to click "OK" to accept cookies. They may number in the hundreds.
  
  Unfortunately, some sites, particularly free email sites like Yahoo and Hotmail, require cookies and you have to have them turned on in order to use their services. I consider this personal information and frankly, I'm not fond of it moving back and forth to advertisers. Leaving the "Warn before accepting" message makes the web nearly useless, but allowing that stuff around the internet concerns me.
  
  Enter CookieCop From ZD Net (www.zdnet.com). I downloaded their free utility, "CookieCop," written by Mark Sweeney and installed it. Although not a perfect solution (It doesn't handle multiple Netscape or IE accounts very well), it does seem to do the trick. Only those sites which I desire (Hotmail, etc), get their cookies; all others hear nothing but silence. You can configure the CookieCop at the granular level and I recommend you look at this program. Others in the same genre include CookieCrusher and CookieMasher.
  

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