Spying Eyes

Marketers Make the Best Snoops

While the aforementioned tactics bar the hackers, they do nothing to protect you from merchants and marketers.

Companies collect detailed information from the Web sites you visit about what you buy and how much you spend. According to a recent survey of 1,400 Web sites by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 92 percent of the sites collect personal information, but only 14 percent list their information-collection practices, and only two percent have a "comprehensive" privacy policy. Such a policy lets you choose not to have your personal data used for marketing or sold to third parties and includes adequate online security procedures.

"Efforts to encourage voluntary adoption of the most basic fair-information practices have fallen short of what is needed to protect consumers," says Robert Pitofsky, the FTC's chairman.

The most insidious of the direct marketers are the "cookie" companies. These are marketers with names like DoubleClick, MatchLogic, NetGravity and IntelliWeb, which drop digital crumbs (known as cookies) into your hard drive when you visit the Web site of an advertiser they're monitoring. The tiny cookie files track your movements on the Internet--locations you go to and sometimes your activities, such as purchases and things you ask to see. Then, when you go to a similar Internet location, the cookie alerts the marketer that you're there and tells it of your interests. By cross-referencing the data about you that cookies carry, the marketers build an electronic dossier detailing who you are and what you do, buy and read. And then they target specific advertising banners to your interests as you enter new sites.

DoubleClick, an Internet marketing-data company based in New York, claims there's nothing new in what it's doing. Magazines, junk mailers and even supermarkets have been using databases built from customer-preference and demographic information for promotions for years. What's more, adds Christopher Saridakis, DoubleClick's business-development director, the company is helping consumers cut through the barrage of marketing schemes that they see on the Internet: "We distribute ads that are relevant to their interests."

To avoid their good intentions, don't accept cookies; there are programs that block them. Some are available for free at sites like www.cookiecentral.com/files.htm and www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/cookies.html . There, you'll also find information on how to tell your browser to reject cookies and ways to clean them off your hard drive.

As another measure, you can tell some companies not to use the information they gather or sell it to others for marketing purposes. Simply tell DoubleClick and other companies that offer this choice not to include you in their databases. In most cases the opt-out provision can be found in the company's home-page privacy policy if it has one.