Ways Technology Threatens Your Privacy (and How to Protect Yourself)

6) Targeted advertising and cookies

In order to show us ads that are more likely to produce a sale, marketers eagerly collect all sorts of personal data about us, from demographic information like sex, age, and location to evidence of our interests and online activities. These companies gather much of this information by dropping small files called cookies on our computer hard drives. Some are helpful and make sites work better, but many are cooked up by intrusive marketers to collect reams of revealing information over the course of years. You may want to accept short-lived "session cookies," which help a site remember what you've done on its pages during a single visit so you can, for example, make your way through e-commerce checkout. But you may want to block or delete "persistent cookies," which let the site remember you the next time you visit, and "third-party cookies" used by advertisers to track you as you move around the Web. You can usually set your browser to accept or reject different types of cookes in the 'Internet Options/Preferences' menu, and anti-virus scanners can also detect them every time you scan your computer, but more details on how to spot and manage cookies can be found here.