Hiro said:
Sometimes when I go websites, I find ads displaying info about me like my
location which is dead accurate. It scares me a lot when ever I encounter
these ads. Is there a way I can view all personal info on Vista and be
able
to change it? Much thanks.
There are two main aspects to this, one of which should be of concern to
you, and the other which shouldn't. It depends on the specificity of the
information they show about you. However, please keep in mind that the
worst web sites won't give you any idea that they're collecting any
information about you for unethical purposes.
1) The most likely way that a web site you visited can tell -- in a
relatively vague way -- where you are, is from the IP address of your
computer when you're connected to the internet. Ranges of IP addresses are
assigned to various ISP and institutions. If, for instance, you use
Smalltown Internet Services as your ISP and SIS services only customers in
Smalltown, all a site has to do is look up in a database that SIS
distributes those addresses and it can guess that you live in Smalltown.
There are other ways to make reasonably close guesses about where you live,
but they won't get any personally identifiable information about you from
that alone. This may be alarming and might be used in unethical marketing
practices (to make you needlessly afraid), but it's relatively innocuous.
The site that you visited, while possibly rude, is probably harmless.
However, almost any web site will record your IP address when you submit a
financial or other legally binding transaction. This is necessary to
protect both them and you.
2) A site might use "tracking cookies. Let's say you go to a site and fill
in a form with your name, address, phone number, etc. The site will store
that information in a database. It then also might put a cookie on your
computer that uniquely identifies you and associates you with that entry in
their database.
Later, when you visit that site again or visit another site that retrieves
that cookie (in which case it is most likely a "third-party" cookie), then
that site can look up your entry in that database to retrieve whatever
information they have collected about you. It can also record in that
database that you were interested in that web site, what time of day you
visited, how many pages you visited, what specific content you saw, how long
you saw it. With enough information about you like that, data mining
programs and analysts can glean a lot of information about you and make good
guesses about such things as which pinkie finger you use to scratch your
nose.
Tracking cookies are relatively easy to control, however. You can use
anti-spyware software that detects and deletes them, or you can customize
cookie handling in Internet Explorer (or whatever browser you use) to
eliminate 3rd-party cookies, or you can use tools registry or hosts files
lists that block bad guy sites. Lots are available. This is not an
exhaustive list of ways to block tracking cookies, but it'll get you
started, and it's probably good enough.
However, please note that not all cookies are bad. Some are very useful and
are used ethically. The best thing that you can do is to review a web
site's privacy policy if you have any questions.
There might be other methods that a really sophisticated web site employs,
but these two are the most common for the phenomenon that you described.
I hope this helps.
