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Browser plugin blocks ad-tracking cookies

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A researcher has developed a browser extension that stops advertising networks from tracking a person's surfing habits, such as search queries and content they view on the web.

The extension, called Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO), enables its users to opt out of 27 advertising networks that are employing behavioural advertising systems, wrote Christopher Soghoian, who developed it, on his website.

Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, modified a browser extension Google released under an Apache 2 open-source license.

Google's opt-out plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox blocks cookies delivered by its Doubleclick advertising network. A cookie is a small data file stored in a browser that can track a variety of information, such as websites visited and search queries, and transmit that information back to the entity that placed the cookie in the browser.

Google's opt-out plugin comes as the company announced plans last week to target advertisements based on the sites people visit. Targetted advertising is seen as a way for advertisers to more precisely find potential customers as well as for website publishers to charge higher advertising rates.

But the behavioural advertising technologies have raised concern over how consumers get enrolled in the programs, what data is being tracked and how the data is protected.

Many advertising networks will let consumers add an opt-out cookie to their browser, which means their web activity won't be traced. But Soghoian wrote that if someone clears cookies from their browser, they'd have to go through the opt-out process again, which can be complicated if a couple dozen opt-out cookies have already been set. Firefox, for example, has a privacy setting that will clear cookies automatically when a browser is closed.

"This is obviously not a reasonable thing to expect," he wrote.

Soghoian's TACO extension sets permanent opt-out cookies for Google's network and 26 others, even if the cookies are flushed from the browser. Since some websites use multiple advertising cookies, TACO puts a total of 41 opt-out cookies on a machine, Soghoian wrote.

Ultimately, TACO is temporary fix for a long-term issue. Ideally, there would be a single, universal opt-out cookie which would be honored by marketers, Soghoian wrote. The problem is that for privacy reasons, cookies can't be accessed by domains that didn't set the cookie in the first place

http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=112888
 
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