It's Not Just Paranoia When Everyone Really Is Out To Get You--Or Your Demographic Profile. By Ian Thrall FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ONCE warned, "When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you." He wasn't talking about cyberspace, but he might as well have been. Fact is, when you browse around the World Wide Web the flow of information isn't entirely one way: You may be revealing quite a bit about yourself in the process. And some sites are paying attention. Visit a commercial site and you'll get a pretty good frisking down without even knowing it. The first step of going through your virtual pockets is to get the information your browser will readily yield up to anyone who knows how to ask: the name and internet address of your computer (from which your geographical location can usually be determined), the brand and version of your browser, the type of computer or operating system it's running on, and what site you were visiting immediately before. If you walked into a store and were subjected to this kind of grilling, you'd probably tell them where to stuff their business. But all this is available to a web site the moment you slouch in. It should come as no surprise that once you're there a site can record each mouse click and the intervals in between, thus building up a picture of your interests. For any one site this may not seem very intrusive; in some cases you may even appreciate it. But like ex-landlords, creditors and former dates, marketing companies sometimes talk to each other. In the material world they share telephone and mailing lists all the time. There's no reason why they won't share your online consumption habits as well. Anyone with the wherewithal to feed a net habit exhibits some of the salient characteristics of that telemarketer's grail, the Qualified Buyer. And if commercial sites aren't yet shopping their databases of online visitors through consumer information brokers, they soon will be. More obnoxious than what they're storing is where they store it. Not just on their machines, but on yours. While a web page is loading, the site can ask your browser to store what is known as a "cookie." This name dates back to the days when computing terms were still being coined by grad students desperately short of giggles rather than the suits who coin them today. If the cookie were invented last week, they'd probably call it a "Reentrancy Validation Token" and refer to it by acronym after that. But basically, a cookie is like the stamp they put on your hand so you can get back into a bar without having to pay the cover again. Only it's not just the Yikes! guy or a picture of a saguaro or something, it's any information they want to store about your visit. And your browser will slavishly give it back whenever you visit that place again. The stated purpose for adding cookies to browser applications is to store "shopping basket" information as an aid to online commerce. But shopping online hasn't really caught on. So what are they baking into these cookies of theirs? Mostly they're storing what you looked at. And so are their advertisers. If you'd just as soon they didn't, you won't get much help from the big two contenders in the browser market, Netscape and Internet Explorer. Both give you the option of approving or disapproving any one cookie, but neither has a setting to automatically reject all cookies outright. But you can force them, if you know a little bit about how file attributes work on your particular computer. We'll give you the basic technique; the rest is left as an exercise for the reader. If you're using Netscape, the cookies are stored in a file in the Netscape directory or folder under a fairly obvious file name like "cookies.txt". (The precise name depends on your operating system.) With the program not running, set the "read only" attribute on this file. This prevents Navigator from storing cookies, but it will work normally in every other respect. Internet Explorer stores cookies in the folder "Windows\Cookies". Set the "read only" attribute on all files in this folder that end in ".dat". Unlike Netscape, Explorer will complain bitterly when you run it again, make dire threats, suggest that you've done irreversible damage and generally try to put the fear of Gates into you, but there's really nothing wrong and the program will still work. And it won't be able to store those cookies. Locking up your cookie jar solves the problem of your hard disk being used as somebody else's scratch pad, but it doesn't turn you invisible. If you're really paranoid about anyone in particular knowing you stopped by, be it the CIA site or the House of Virtual Boobs, you can go in under their radar via one of an increasing number of HTML filter sites. Visit one of these, enter a starting address in the handy space provided, and it will let you continue on to other sites while humorously altering the the content of everything you see. One example is the "Valley URL" (www.80s.com/ Entertainment/ValleyURL), which inserts Valleyisms, the least of which are "Omigod!" and "Like totally," into every page. (Recommended for really fatuous places like psifactor.com.) The site www.metahtml.com/apps/zippy/welcome.mhtml will similarly pepper your reading matter with quotes from Zippy the Pinhead. Apart from brightening up no end of dull text, these sites and others like them have a useful side effect: While they pass along text and images, they don't pass on requests for information from your browser. Consequently when a site tries to discover where you're coming from, they'll learn a lot about the Zippy or Valley Girl host and squat about you. This technique inevitably slows things down and is never completely free of small glitches, so it's recommended only for those with a compelling reason to skulk. There is a dedicated site designed to perform this service on purpose and without modifying text, at www.anonymizer.com. But apart from not being funny, it inserts its own advertising into each page in addition to any ad banners that were already there. Zippy's preferable to that any time. So get out there and have fun, kids, but as always when poking your equipment into strange places, you might want to use protection.

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