New Cookie Technologies: Harder to See and Remove, Widely Used to Track You [Telecom]

New Cookie Technologies: Harder to See and Remove, Widely Used to Track You

Technical Analysis by Seth Schoen September 14th, 2009

This is part 1 of a three-part series on user tracking on the web today.

Cookies are still a privacy problem for web users, many years after privacy advocates first raised concerns about their use to track web browsing. Today, cookies are one of the main mechanisms that advertising companies like Google use to track and profile users across sites and over time -- often building up a single gigantic profile for years and years. Many EFF members respond to this threat by using their browsers' cookie management features to limit which cookies they'll accept or how long they'll be retained.

But it turns out that the cookie situation is quite a bit trickier today, and sites that want to track users have new technical options that are hard for users to respond to. The traditional "cookie" is an HTTP cookie, invented by Lou Montulli and John Giannandrea at Netscape in 1994. But today many browsers implement a range of things with the same kind of cookie-like tracking behavior -- mechanisms that are far less familiar, harder to notice, and often harder to control.

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