Big Brother meets Mad Men

The Wall Street Journal looked into online tracking tools that major U.S. websites download onto your computer (my emphasis):

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person's keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person's social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.

To measure the sensitivity of the data gathered by tracking companies, the Journal created an "exposure index" for the top 50 sites. Dictionary.com ranked highest in exposing users to potentially aggressive surveillance: It installed 168 tracking tools that didn't let users decline to be tracked, and 121 tools that, according to their privacy statements, don't rule out collecting financial or health data. Dictionary.com attributed the number of tools to its use of many different ad networks, each of which puts tools on its site.

Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

The ad industry says tracking doesn't violate anyone's privacy because the data sold doesn't identify people by name, and the tracking activity is disclosed in privacy policies. And while many companies are involved in collecting, analyzing and selling the data, they provide a useful service by raising the chance Internet users see ads and information relevant to them personally.

I just love how these people, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (interviewed here on NPR), think that we users are just thrilled to be getting all of these "relevant" ads.

Some sites, like Google and Microsoft, provide ways of opting out of their tracking tools.

You can also clear all the cookies on your computer, or do what I just did: go through them and selectively remove all the ones that you don't recognize.