After surfing the web day in and day out, you've probably piled up a lot of advertising cookies. A lot of major ad providers, like Google, for example, save cookies and track browsing activity to provide better ad targeting. Unless you know that you can opt out of this stuff, you don't have much of a choice about this stuff. Privacychoice has collected the opt-out features of a lot of major advertisers in one convenient button, so you can stop all of their cookies at once.

Privacychoice works by giving you blank cookies for all of the sites on its list, so they don't have any information about you, but they also don't try to set new cookies without asking you. Sure, you could just set your browser to block ALL third-party cookies, but maybe you have some non-advertising sites with cookies you care about. Privacychoice is a way to get rid of annoying cookies without giving up the good ones. Be sure to switch off your ad-blocker when you're setting up Privacychoice, but go ahead and turn it back on when you're done.

You know the federal Do Not Call registry that lets US telephone customers sign up for a list to avoid telemarketers? Two consumer advocacy groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to basically create the same kind of registry -- for the internet.

Now, let's pretend that a US agency could regulate the way that internet companies track your data for advertising and other purposes. How exactly would that work? One way would be for the the FTC would have to require every advertising firm and web site that's accessible in the US to use a potentially enormous list of consumers to figure which computers they can place cookies on and which computers they cannot.

Or the burden could be placed on consumers to sign up for a service like the Network Advertising Initiative, which places its own cookie on your computer to alert over a dozen major advertisers that you have chosen to opt-out of targeted ads. But if you happen to clean out your cookies accidentally, you'll need to reinstall the software. or if you happen across a page from a company that hasn't signed on, you could still be tracked.

We're not saying that consumers shouldn't be able to opt out of targeted advertising. We're just saying that the people asking for federal regulation seem to be either incredibly ambitious or they lack a basic understanding of how the internet works.

[via Techdirt and CNet]

If more than one person uses your home computer, odds are you're constantly logging in and out of your Gmail, Flickr, YouTube, and other online accounts. Sure, you could set up separate profiles for each person who uses your operating system, but who wants to take the time to switch user logins just to check their email?

That's where CookieSwap comes in. This lightweight Firefox extension lets you create several distinct cookie profiles in Firefox. Just right-click on the profile button and choose the profile you want to use for each session. Any cookies you download during your browsing session will be saved to your current profile. So for example, if you sign into Gmail and check the box for Firefox to remember your login information, it will be saved to the current profile. You can then switch to a different profile if you want to login as a different user.

CookieSwap works reasonably well, but it's a bit rough around the edges when it comes to tweaking or adding profiles. If you click the "manage profiles" button all you'll get is the directory where your profiles reside. You'll have to navigate to that directory to manually rename your profiles or to add extra profiles if you need more than three.

[via DailyApps]

Look, we're as happy as anyone that Facebook has figured out how to start making money through advertising. But we're also as freaked out as anyone that one way the company will do this is by tracking your web surfing behavior and add it to your profile.

Fortunately Nate Weiner figured out an extraordinarily simple solution (for Firefox users). Just install the BlockSite Firefox add-on and block Facebook Beacon.

Weiner was playing an online game the other day when he noticed a pop up window telling him that the web site was going to share his information with his Facebook profile. He had an option to say "no thanks," but like many people, Weiner figured he'd rather not get the message in the first place. So he found the offending requests were sent to "http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php." So you could either add that URL to your BlockSite blacklist, or better yet, add "http://www.facebook.com/beacon/*" to block any requests to the entire Beacon folder.

And now you have your privacy back. For now.

AOL has announced plans to let users opt out of targeted advertising. Right now AOL (which happens to be this blog's parent company) and many other web sites place cookies in your browser allowing the site to serve up targeted ads every time you visit an AOL web site.

By the end of the year, AOL plans to offer you the ability to opt out of targeted advertising. You'll still see advertising, but AOL won't be tracking your personal data. The company will also launch a public service campaign letting people know about their right to opt-out by placing banner ads on various pages.

Advocates of targeted advertising say the cookies make it easier for web publishers to serve up ads that readers will be most interested in by tracking browsing habits. That doesn't do much to ease the privacy concerns of people who read 1984 as a work of non-fiction.

The opt-out technology was developed by behavioral marketing firm Tacoda, which AOL purchased earlier this year. Somehow we didn't think AOL was buying a behavioral advertising firm in order to serve up less targeted ads. But the New York Times reports that while AOL will let users opt out, it will try to convince them that they should opt in. After all, if you're going to get ads anyway, wouldn't you rather they be for sales on your favorite movies, music, and other items?

Of course, the only way for AOL to know which computer users have opted out of targeted advertising is to place a cookie in your browser.

The beloved, and sometimes hated, browser cookie has been entered into evidence in a Texas court. A Texas man actually used the cookies on his computer as a trail of time stamped data of his web activities to try and prove his innocence and where he was at the time prosecutors say he was somewhere else. Mr. Texas had a court restraining order in place from his ex-wife, and Mrs. Ex-Texas claimed to have seen him stalking her. Mr. Texas had a great excuse, he was checking out the Home Depot website that morning, and could not have possibly been stalking. Mr. Texas made a disk showing his online actions stamped by cookies embedded on his computer. The trail of data didn't prove effective however. The jury agreed with the prosecution that the cookie data could have been altered, and poor Mr. Texas has to face 365 of confinement, and a $2000 fine. Why his legal representatives didn't try and use the actual computer logs from the websites in question and his internet service provider data is unclear. He might have had a chance to be a free man.

Cookies: Can't live with 'em, can't turn 'em off. But you can tame them. Lifehacker points us to a great Firefox extension called CookieCuller that helps you bend your cookies to your will. More specifically, CookieCuller lets you protect some cookies (e.g. so you don't get logged out of your webmail every time you close the browser) while deleting others automatically. While Firefox 2 somewhat obviates the latter function, the former alone is worth the price of admission. Or would be, if the price of admission weren't free.

While you can track certain info with cookies (ask the tinfoil hat crowd for a complete list), there's still a lot of things that cookies leave out by design. So Microsoft has patented the "super cookie." What is a super cookie? According to ArsTechnica super cookies are just like regular cookies, but better. Obviously Microsoft, or anyone looking to improve data reporting, wants to increase the amount of info stored in cookies. That is supposedly the nature of this patent, involving tracking data and most importantly, it adds the ability to allow more data types in the future. The current patent allows four to start with: bits, counters, dates, and strings. Check out the ArsTechnica article for a specific example from the filing, which was submitted in 2000, but was awarded to MS this week.

Awhile back I posted about the new search results interface Google was supposedly testing. I can definitely confirm that today. This blog post describes how to set a new cookie in Firefox that will force Google to display the new results page for you. Since the instructions are a little off (and took me some fiddling to make them to work), here's my version:

Update: In the comments reader Whosawhatsis has posted an easier way to accomplish the same thing without installing any extensions. Try that first.

1. Download and install the Add N Edit Cookies extension. Restart Firefox.

2. Run the extension by going to Tools > Cookie Editor.

3. Type "google" into the box at the top and click "Filter/Refresh". Scroll through the list and look for a cookie called "PREF" (Disclaimer: I don't know what this cookie is really for, so modify it at your own risk!).

   1. If it exists, double-click on it and change the "Content" field to the following (remove the line break first):

      ID=fb7740f107311e46:TM=1142683332:
      LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu

   2. If it does not exist, you must create it. Click on Add. Enter PREF for the Name and the bold string above for Content. Set the Domain to .google.com and / for the Path. Set the expiration date to whatever you want--pick "Expire at end of session" if you only want to see the "new" Google until the next time you launch Firefox. Otherwise set a date far in the future.

4. Click Save and then close out of the Cookie Editor. The next time you search Google you should see the new search results page. If you get sick of it, you can just delete to cookie and it'll go away.