[citw150] Lesson 3, Question 6

Hi everyone,
This starts out being a message about cookies and morphs into a message about 
data mining, so I guess it's a two-tiered answer.

What I wanted to start out kind of tied into the porn message that I sent 
earlier.  I have the "cookies" feature on my computer set at "prompt" so that 
every time I go to a site the computer has to ask if I want it to put a cookie 
on it.  Most times I do, and I just delete them all every other day or so.  
What I have found, however, is that just doing some mundane searches I have had 
porn sites attempt to put a cookie on my computer just from a search engine.  
How can this be right?  

This site:
http://www.windley.com/docs/Cookies%20and%20Privacy.pdf gives a lot of 
straight-forward information on cookie basics.  What it comes down to is it's 
not necessarily the cookie from one web site that's the issue, it's the sharing 
of the cookies that can cause the problem.   Kind of like a Mongolian Flu 
shared via a good chocolate chip cookie.

Then there's times that I have to look up a lot of strange government 
information, like information on cargo ships or vessels that sail the big 
bodies of water or information on trains.  This is all the kind of stuff that 
bad people who want to do bad things in our country might look up to build bad 
things.  

Which leads me to the thought that I think government has too much power over 
what we do on the Internet.  It wouldn't surprise me in the least if I was a 
little on the fringe of someone that they keep their eye on because of all the 
medical, international, and government research that I have to do for my job.  
Here is some information on what they do:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04548.pdf\

Read what happened to this guy because he had a traffic violation and somewhere 
along the line someone had it show up as jail time.  What's wrong with that 
picture?  His information is at:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/18/2003/main589352.shtml

Do other people have their cookie prompts turned on, I wonder?

Take care, everyone.

Melissa
MelissaDeMong@xxxxxxxxxxx
"Everyone gets the same 24 hours in a day; the difference is what you do with 
them."

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