OT Re: [xl7] Check this!
2002-12-05 by Jonathan El-Bizri
>Although some of you may have already seen the following >information, it will probably be new to others of you. It is >important, especially now that your privacy is being threatened on >so many fronts simultaneously. This concerns ANYONE who is either on >any Yahoo mailing list, or who is a member of Yahoo but is not on >any list . Yahoo! is now using something called "Web beacons" to >track Yahoo! users around the Internet and see what you are doing. >Seems these beacons work like cookies. Go to this URL: >http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/pixels/details.html Read it again - it's not that bad. They don't work like cookies. They are just fancy versions of a web counter, that records the ip address of a http request , along with some kind of database to make sense of the data. The only sites they will know you've been to will be sites that also have the 'beacon' thing also set up. They aren't snooping on your browsing as much as aggregating data across multiple commercial sites. It's like someone recording how many times you went to safeway and starbucks each week, rather than someone following you around town writing down who you visit. I'm still turning it off on all my computers though. Jonathan