more on Sleazy Ebay doubleclick practices *and* thanks Eudora!

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei () rsasecurity com>
Date: November 15, 2004 10:25:12 AM EST
To: dave () farber net, Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: RE: [IP] Sleazy Ebay doubleclick practices *and* thanks Eudora!

For IP, if you wish.

> From: "M"
>
> On the Mac, I recently updated my Eudora to the latest beta release.
> I can't recall exactly when this feature was enabled, but when I mouse
> over an HTML URL, Eudora opens a small box and displays the entire
> URL string - the real string which is passed to a browser - not the
> display string.  Guest what I noticed?  Every All Favorites HTML
> URL link is laundered through ebay.doubleclick.net, with what appears
> to be a unique ID for the user.

I don't know if it'll work for the ebay stalking cookie, but you
can defang the regular doubleclick cookie. Go to
http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about_doubleclick/privacy/
and click on the 'Opt Out' icon.

This sets the data value of your .doubleclick.net cookie to
"OPT_OUT" and so your data gets mixed with everyone else who
opts out.

While you're at it, you might want to think about the
consequences of the most popular search engine's id cookie.
Unfortunately, you need that one for the company's free
webmail to work. As a result, I use different browsers
(IE and Mozilla) for search and webmail, and block the
search engine's cookie in Mozilla, my main browser.

Maintaining privacy is approaching impossibility. We
need a new ethic of what data it is appropriate to
gather and hold about individuals. In the past,
data-harvesting was  cost-limited. With computers
and the net, it is just too easy.

Peter Trei

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