Cookie countermeasures
Some Web advertising firms, such as Double Click, have responded to user complaints about tracking by providing users with the ability to opt out of their databases. But others have notââ,¬"and many users believe that trusting any such firm to protect privacy is akin to allowing the fox to guard the henhouse. Your best bet, therefore, is to take matters into your own hands.
The most foolproof way to keep yourself from being tracked via cookies is to disable them entirely. In Netscape, you can do this by selecting Edit | Preferences and selecting the Advanced item in the left-hand column. In Internet Explorer, select Tools | Internet Options and disable cookies by customising the security settings.
Unfortunately, disabling cookies can prevent you from using many e-commerce Web sites. And asking your browser to prompt you before accepting or sending a cookie can be equally annoying. A single Web page may contain dozens of images, each of which may come with a cookie; you may have to click dozens of times just to get past all of the prompts and see the page.
A better approach, therefore, is to install third-party software that blocks or disables cookies more selectively. Software that blocks advertising banners, such as WebWasher (free download, www.webwasher.com), has the pleasant side effect of blocking cookies associated with ads while not affecting cookies from other sites. The powerful Internet Junkbuster Proxy (www.junkbusters.com) is a combination advertising blocker and cookie blocker, and has many useful features. This product lets you block or allow cookies by domain name and gives you the power to feed sites vanilla wafers (cookies set by you rather than by the site).
None of these programs is foolproof, though. Although the Internet Junkbuster Proxy blocks cookies that are sent directly by a Web server, it doesn't stop cookies from being sent via JavaScript, Java programs, or HTML constructs called metatags. And each time a method of setting and retrieving cookies is blocked, you can be sure that enterprising advertisers and Web page designers begin a hunt for more.
Other utilities also let you choose which sites can feed your browser cookies, and some can help you sort through your cookie files and eliminate cookies from sites you do not want to track you.
If you want to avoid cookies that are fed to your machine via e-mail, do not use an e-mail program that automatically invokes the rendering engine of a Web browser when you view mail. If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, you have no choice but to use Internet Explorer's rendering engine; the two are inextricably tied together. But Eudora, one of the most popular e-mail clients, gives you a choice. If you uncheck the box marked Use Microsoft's Viewer in Eudora's Tools | Options | Viewing Mail dialog box, ie will not be invoked to view your mail.
excelant article
one addtional point:
one way to prevent the reading of email in outlook and outlook express from triggering the html bugs, etc is to
1) download your email
2) disable your internet connection
3) read all your email
4) enable your internet connection