Internet Tips: Free Tool Nabs Web Bugs

Crush Cookies With IE'S P3P

If you've been paying any attention to Internet privacy, you probably know about cookies--small text files that Web sites put on your hard disk to identify you and perhaps remember your preferences. Cookies have long been reviled as a threat to personal privacy, generating a small industry of cookie-smashing utilities and tips articles for disabling cookies.

While many cookies are benign or helpful, others (like the Web bugs described earlier) can pass your browsing habits, your identity, and even your e-mail address to third-party advertisers and marketers.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium--the folks who set many of the Web's standards) is finalizing a standard that will automatically describe a site's privacy practices. The Consortium's P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) standard may not yet be final, but Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 already supports it, as do numerous Web sites (see the W3C's list of the latter). Visit the W3C's pages to find FAQs and other P3P information.

You needn't do anything special to take advantage of P3P in IE 6, which at this writing is due to ship in late October. The browser's default Medium privacy setting blocks all third-party cookies (usually created by advertisements embedded in the current page) from sites that don't have a P3P policy in place, and it blocks any cookies that use personally identifiable information (such as your name or e-mail address) without asking for your permission.

If that's too stringent or not secure enough for you, choose Tools, Internet Options, click the Privacy tab, move the slider up or down until you find a privacy level that suits your needs, and click OK.

It's too soon to tell whether P3P will really protect your online privacy, and whether other browser makers will support it. Netscape Navigator users already can block all third-party cookies (leaving the site's own cookies functional).

In Navigator 4.7 x, choose Edit, Preferences, click Advanced, check Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server, and click OK. In Netscape 6 and in the open-source Mozilla browser it's based on, choose Edit, Preferences, select Cookies under 'Privacy and Security', check Enable cookies for the originating web site only, and click OK.