There's no such thing as a private Web

The recent news stories about Facebook's changing privacy rules has brought the subject of Web privacy to the forefront -- but do you really know who's watching you on the Web or what information they're collecting about you? As I test, I decided to turn off cookies in my Web browser (or, more accurately, I set my browser to ask before it accepts cookies) to get a better idea of who's watching. Here's what I found in my brief, highly unscientific study.

Amazon.com attempted to place 14 different cookies when I did a product search. What are those 14 different cookies keeping track of and for whom? Who knows but they're hardly the leading offenders. Yahoo = 34 cookies. CNN = 47 cookies. Facebook = 12 cookies. And foxnews.com lead my small sample with 56 cookies. In all cases, these cookies came from the sites I was visiting as well as from ad servers and from vague, seemingly unrelated third-party sites including one from a domain named revsci.net that was set to expire in the year 2042.

I visited revsci.net and I was taken to AudienceScience. Their mission statement explains that "AudienceScience offers the most powerful and flexible targeting platform for collecting and measuring people's interest and intent through their Web behavior." Well, that seems to be a good enough reason to allow them permission to track my activities for the next 32 years. What could possibly go wrong with that?