For the past 10 years, we have seen all kinds of ads on web sites, we have seen ads for websites on TV commercials, magazines and just about every product you purchase today has an ad for the manufactures website. Did you know these ad companies are developing smarter technologies, which track you all over the Internet? Much like search engines now do? Oh you didn’t know your search engine tracks where you go and what you have looked at? Google recently did a TV special on CNBC called "In the mind of Google".

   Google keeps ALL search queries ever done, it states that it sanitizes some of the data so it can’t be tracked back to an individual or PC as time goes on. However in the mean time Google sells the data statistics and results it collects to ad companies and that data may or may not be sanitized enough to render you or your computers identity to the purchaser.

   Should this shock you? Should people be upset? Look in your wallet or your key chain do you have a grocery store club card? You are voluntarily being tracked. That card is tied to your phone number and that phone number is tied to the information you gave them to get that discount card. Everything you buy and then use that card, now becomes part of your shopping profile, where ever you go in the United States. Most people don’t object to this, because they feel that the discount they are getting is worth the information they are sharing or being allowed to track.

   Tracking is said to be done to find out what the consumers want, what they buy most often and where and what time of year. This is said to help inventory control so that there is no shortage of goods at a particular time where demand might be higher. This data creates a growing history to see how a particular store or merchandiser is doing from year to year and ties in to their advertising programs. Ever notice that you get coupons at the checkout from that printer of things you rarely buy, but have purchased? It knows what items you will purchase, the time of year you would purchase them and entices you to purchase them, oh and it knows the profit margin if you do purchase them.

So how does this deal with ads on the Internet and web sites. We have given you a peek inside how the grocery stores do it, now if you translate that to websites and think of the data you enter we will explain now how you are tracked.

   Every website that has ads or a form you fill out places what is called a cookie on your computer. Cookies are for the most part harmless to your computer system, but what they do is store your preferences for the sites you visit depending on how they are written and what they are written to store on your computer for the next visit. Most cookies are written with some form of encryption or code which otherwise looks meaningless at first glance. But when the person returns to the site that wrote the cookie, the cookie is read and all the preferences of the site are presented to the user, if set up that way. Or the website lets the onsite or 3rd party ad system know you have returned and what products or services you are looking at.

   Now that the website knows who you are again, it can serve up ads based on what you shop for or the site s scans your computer for other ad cookies that were written by other ad sites. Many webmasters try to ‘monetize’ their sites and have trackers that write ad cookies using affiliate codes. So if a person is enticed by an ad and clicks on it to purchase it, chances are the original site that wrote the cookie will get credited for the sale.

   This is the opposite of how grocery stores work. The grocery store gives you a discount for your trackable information, however a website gets paid on your trackable information if you purchase something. The product or service is still discounted, but the money goes in a different direction. In my mind I think manufactures should write cookies to give the purchaser a discount based on how many times they have seen the ad. Meaning it could be done simply by incrementing a counter cookie to a max discount value, then when a person purchases it on the web, the discount is automatically applied.

   I believe the consumer mind set would be more at ease shopping online knowing they get this hidden discount. Of course a smart person would see how to take advantage of this fairly easily. So the idea of profit sharing affiliation came to my mind. This is where the website gets paid and the online consumer gets a discount. This could be set up during the affiliation application period of the website and changed only periodically. This puts websites in direct competition for products and services based on the consumer discount being received.

   An ad company could then track other demographic information, not just from online consumers, but how its’ products and services are stacking up against their competition on the same webpage.

   Of course it gets a bit more complicated than that and this article is about how to get out of being tracked online, so we will now explore this.

   Recently, 12/9/2009, ZEDO, Inc. the largest privately held ad server in the US, announced a partnership with eXelate, the creator of the world’s first behavioral targeting data exchange. This means these companies can now track behavioral shopping habits from over 170 million online purchasers. (read the press release here)

   WoW, that is almost disturbing. Especially to people like us were we purchase items based on economics and need and not on desire and frills or hype.

   So how do you get out of being tracked? Let’s start with the easiest, having the browser clear our private data or at the very least cookies every time we turn it off. We will then move in to learning how to find Opt – Out tracking and implementing it’s use, and the last way, it using anonymous browsing sessions on the internet to mask our IP address and personal information passed by our computer system.

Turn off Tracking in Browsers:

FIREFOX: Two ways

1. Click on Tools | Start Private Browsing “ctrl + shift + p”

   Beware when you enter Private Browsing mode it will shut down all your open tabs to go in to this mode. It notifies you in the header bar that you are in (“Private Browsing”)

2. Click on Tools | Options | Privacy Tab |

   We have some options on FireFox 3.5 and up, we can automatically “start Firefox in a private browsing session”, which means, according to FireFox it "...won't keep any browser history, search history, download history, web form history, cookies, or temporary internet files. However, files you download and bookmarks you make will be kept."

   You could set these options individually and whether or not you wish to accept third-party cookies and just how long you wish to keep them, which could include deleting them after closing the browser. You can even set “Exceptions” when choosing NOT to accept cookies from sites. And finally Clearing the history when FireFox closes and you can set those options as well.

   All of this prevents repeat tracking of your IP address any information you give up to a web site from being collected by another website or by the same website in a future visit.

Internet Explorer 8 is very similar in that it also has two ways to accomplish the same tasks as above

1. Click on Safety | In Private Browsing “ctrl + shift + p” (same as firefox)
2. Click on Tools | Internet Options

   This is where it gets complicated, you can set your options on the General, Security and Privacy tabs, it’s not all in one place like Fire Fox.

   However IE 8's InPrivate mode shows a graphic in the address bar to show that you are in that mode. It also opens a new browser window and process to isolate the private from non-private sessions. The advantage to IE8 is that you can private browser per tab unlike FireFox.

Chrome's Incognito mode operated similarly to IE8's InPrivate: you open a new window with Ctrl-Shift-N for a private session. Like IE, Chrome uses processes to isolate browser sessions for security. Non-private sessions continue as-is.

Finally, Safari's private browsing mode appears to be a system-global setting, but doesn't shut down your existing sessions. From our testing it looks like your existing sessions become private once you set it on, but we haven’t been able to 100% verify this.

   Firefox does raise the bar some in terms of manually clearing history and other private data: Now you can selectively clear the last hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, the current day or everything. IE8 doesn't let you approach the problem this way.

Learning how to find Opt – Out tracking

   While in the last section you undoubtedly saw a Cookie session setting in each browser you use, you can also use this to LOOK at the cookies you computer currently has. The goal here is to find the Opt-Out option for the ad companies themselves. This does take a lot longer to implement and it should provide more protection to your email IN box from getting future spam or ads, but nothing is guaranteed as the rules of the web change to often.

   So open your favorite browser and go to your cookies section. Nice Ads actually say “Ad” somewhere in the cookie name and make them easy to spot. For example it seems everyone has this cookie “ad.doubleclick.net”. The obvious question you have right now is, “Why not just select it and click on Remove Cookie.” Sure, go ahead, do that for every cookie name you don’t want, but that cookie will come back the next time you are on a site with the doubleclick ad tracker on it. What we need to do is opt out of our data from being collected even if this cookie gets placed back on our computer…and it will.

   Do a search for “doubleclick ad opt out”, chances are you will stumble on DoubleClick.com’s privacy policy or see the OptOut link right there in your results. The idea here is to take what ever the ad cookie is, do a search for it with the words “opt out” to get to a point to opt out. Our results took us to this page http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx. This one is nice because at the time of this writing, it states what places use this cookie, how the cookie is constructed and what the data and purpose of the data is collect and what it will be used for. At the very bottom of the page is their OPT-OPT image, which will correct your cookie on your system to stop collecting certain data.

   Now you know how to research Opting Out of an ad agencies tracking.

So the last one is how to surf the web anonymously.
   You will first want to do a web search for “anonymous proxy”. An anonymous proxy acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from servers. (read more on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server). What basically happens is your computer will be connected to a proxy server, you browser will then send requests to the proxy server, the proxy server will then get the information and send it back to your browser. All without passing on any personal information from your computer including cookies, the potential purposes are:

• To keep machines behind it anonymous (mainly for security)
• To speed up access to resources (using caching). Web proxies are commonly used to cache web pages from a web server
• To apply access policy to network services or content, e.g. to block undesired sites.
• To log / audit usage, i.e. to provide company employee Internet usage reporting.
• To bypass security/ parental controls.
• To scan transmitted content for malware before delivery.
• To scan outbound content, e.g., for data leak protection.
• To circumvent regional restrictions.

   Proxy’s have two ways of usage, you can either surf a single web page right there on their website or you can sign up to get an account so that you can get more protection or use them upon start up of your browser.

   Now you know how better to hide your personal information from being collected by Ad servers. By the Way, you would want to implement various parts all 3 of these methods to really hide all your information from being tracked.