What do behavioral trackers know about you?

Posted by Vic Laurie
March 1, 2010

It’s no secret that advertisers want to track what you do on the Internet as much as possible. The more they know about potential advertising targets, the more they can tailor ads so they will attract interest. In fact, there are repositories of extensive data gleaned from tracking cookies. If you would like to check what is known about your surfing habits, one place to look is the database at the registry kept by Blue Kai. And who is Blue Kai? GigaOM explains:

To that end, you can find out exactly what cookies BlueKai — which says it’s the largest U.S. behavioral data provider, and just raised a third round of $21 million while kicking off its third year of existence — has on you. Head over to BlueKai’s registry and you can see, item by item, recent categories you’ve been slotted into based on your browsing history.

When I checked to see what Blue Kai had on me, I received the reassuring message that I was unknown. That’s because I take measures to block tracking cookies and I am gratified to see that the measures seem to be working. Over the years, I have written a number of times about how to control cookies. They are a little out of date but I’ll repeat some references below. (Note that some of these are at sites I no longer own.) I hope to get around to updating my thoughts on cookie control one of these days.

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Internet topics, Privacy

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Comments

Re: flash cookie management

For those who want to manage stored cookies locally, there are two freeware utilities available.

Flash Cookie Cleaner – The Free Flash Cookie Cleaner http://www.flashcookiecleaner.com/

Flash Cookies View – Nirsoft Utilities
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/flash_cookies_view.html

Not that all cookies are bad, but sometimes they linger on and get old, so it’s good to at least check up on them once in a while.

–George

Comment by George on March 1, 2010 @ 2:50 pm

Thanks, George and welcome to the blog. I mentioned Flash Cookie Cleaner in a previous post. And Nirsoft always has good things.

Comment by Vic Laurie on March 1, 2010 @ 3:03 pm

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