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Quick Studies November 2001 • Vol.12 Issue 11 Page(s) 68 in print issue |
Web Browsers Privacy Policies In IE6.0 | ||
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 features a built-in privacy policy feature that keeps your browsing habits from ending up in some marketer's database. While it doesn't address every privacy problem, it does help manage the sometimes misunderstood, but potentially traitorous, cookie. Cookies are nothing more than simple text files some Web sites store on your computer as you browse from page to page. They add useful functions, such as the ability to store your user ID or online shopping preferences. On the other hand, they can also spy on your browsing habits and provide the information to marketing companies. The cookie management features of IE6.0 were still evolving when we looked at the latest preview version of the browser, but the commands discussed below should be very similar to those in the final edition.  Cookie Jar First, a few privacy basics. You can group cookies in at least a couple of ways. First, IE deletes persistent cookies from your computer only at a predefined expiration time; they can potentially reside on your hard drive forever. Session cookies, as the name implies, only stick around until you close IE. Shutting down the browser deletes the session cookies you collected in the course of browsing. Your browser also runs into first-party cookies (those saved to your computer by the Web sites you intend to visit) and third-party cookies (placed by Web sites behind the banner ads and other features on the pages you view).
To set your own cookie policy, click IE's Tools menu and select Internet Options. Click the Privacy tab in the Internet Options dialog box and move the big Settings slider button to see the different settings. Move the bar to the top, and you'll block all cookies from your computer; although effective, this option makes casual Web browsing very annoying. Because so many sites rely on cookies these days, you might find functionality a bit limited. Down at the bottom, of course, is the option to give cookies free run of the place. That's probably not much different than the state of affairs be fore you upgraded to IE6, unless you were running some third-party security program that kept an eye out for cookies. Most folks will want to choose one of the middle options. For example, the Medium setting will block third- party cookies that either do not specify what they do with personal information or indicate they use personal information without your consent. Changing from one privacy option to another will not affect cookies that have already been set on your machine, with one exception: the Block All Cookies option will prohibit all cookie operations. Keep Track If you want to decide which cookies can stay and which to send packing, click the Advanced button, select the Override Automatic Cookie Handling checkbox, and click the Prompt radio button beneath Third-Party Cookies (and First-Party Cookies, if you like). Until you get tired of IE asking you about cookies, you'll be able to tell every time a Web site tries to save a cookie. You can then choose whether to accept it. A More Info button shows you exactly who is trying to save a cookie and what data it contains. For greater customization, you can build a list of sites from which you never want to accept cookies and/or a list of sites from which you always want to accept them. Click the Edit button, and then construct a personal list by typing (or copying and pasting) site URLs (uniform resource locators) and clicking the Block or Allow buttons. If your computer has already stored cookies from the pages you add to your Block list, IE will delete them. Note that as you type site URLs, the program stores only the domain names. For instance, http://www.yahoo.com becomes yahoo.com. This means IE will include all pages at yahoo.com that want to store cookies in your lists, not just Yahoo!'s home page. To edit your list, select a domain name and click the Remove button.  by Alan Phelps |
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