This morning I had some free time and was playing around with some of the features on my Firefox browser. I explored the stored cookies that were tracking my web activity. I then deleted the vast majority of them and changed my settings so that I am asked for permission before a cookie is accepted. I then logged into FT and was asked for permission on the following cookies:

www.flyertalk.com
a.tribalfusion.com
ad.doubleclick.net
altfarm.mediaplex.com

Needless to say, I accepted the first one and denied permission for the last three cookies. In addition, I had just deleted numerous cookies from those three sites when I cleaned out my stored cookies.

I feel that this is an invasion of my privacy. Is FT aware of the fact that these cookies are being loaded without our permission?

Yea, I've been getting the tribal fusion popups for a couple of weeks now. I've been neglectful in getting rid of them, but I am mildly irritated with them.

It's one thing to have popups as you can use a popup blocker or simply close the web page. However it's another thing to load a cookie as most people don't realize what is happening.

Cookies are used to track a lot of things -- for example refusing to accept cookies will result in receiving popunder ads more than once per session.

I'm really surprised that at this date anyone still believes that cookies are a privacy issue. They really are not.

from the wikipedia:

Cookies are GOOD. They prevent you getting the same ad over and over again, I agree with John that the issue of cookies shouldn't be anything to worry about, cookies are harmless. And if you don't like them, block them.

John, correct me if I am wrong, but aren't their not tracking cookies that monitor all of your web activity?

You might want to look at the Opt Out page at www.networkadvertising.org. Through that site, you can allow several advertisers, etc. to place an "blocking cookie" on your computer to tell the site not leave other cookies. Two caveats: you must be accepting third party cookies (either automatically or manually) from these sites and you may need to adjust programs such as Spybot to ignore these tracking cookies.

Sorry, you're wrong. Tribal Fusion would be able to track their own cookies on other sites that use Tribal Fusion. They can't use cookies to track your activity on all of the web.

DoubleClick can, and does:

http://www.hal-pc.org/journal/may02/...rs/tumors.html

Are the DoubleClick cookies coming from Tribal Fusion ads, or somewhere else?

Read the article carefully and you will see that it says exactly what John (and Scott and, now, I) said. Double click can access cookies that it plants. In other words, Doubleclick cannot access a cookie set by Flyertalk. But it can access a cookie that it sets through Flyertalk. Because DC is so pervasive on the web, it has a lot of info about people's surfing habits because it's able to set a lot of cookies. Personally, I couldn't care less but that's just me. Good Housekeeping's advertisers know what its readers will buy and tracks it religiously just like Playboy's advertisers know what its readers will buy. I care much more about Tribalfusion which has a much sketchier record for its use of javascript. You want to be afraid of something, start looking at the power of Java and Javascript, not at cookies.

Understood. but edit to say that "by" or "through" FlyerTalk is meaningless since by omission or comission FlyerTalk enables DoubleClick cookies.

What I'm saying is that DoubleClick can track your movements across the net. Other companies can arrange to share data about users behavior. You don't even have to set a cookie to do that.

In the grand scheme of things cookies may be down in the noise, but they are not entirely harmless either.

That said, I personally don't block cookies. I do opt-out of web tracking sites.

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Two items that should be in your anti -popup -cookie -redirect -webcr*p arsenal:
A Hosts File and eDexter ^

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