It's called the "perma-cookie." As we told you last week, Verizon Wireless has embraced this privacy-busting digital marker, which could give marketers a way to track what you do online whether you want to be tracked or not. Basically, the U.S. wireless carrier is slipping the cookie onto the smartphones that tap the net via its celluar and data network, and most phones owners don't realize it.
Privacy and networking experts really hate the thing - a little strings of data that get inserted into our unencrypted web traffic - because it undermines the way the internet is supposed to work and it wrest control of our online experience away from us. It's viewable by any website you visit, and it could be used by advertising networks to build elaborate profiles of everything we do online.