Once agan, Big Brother has raised been exposed, and we find out that not only is he monitoring your phone calls, emails, and the like, he also wants to go after your web searching records. See a recommended diary -
"Feds want Google search records" - San Jose Mercury News.
It was recently brought to my attention that Yahoo! was using something called "Web Beacons", which, according to Yahoo!:
#Yahoo! uses web beacons within the Yahoo! network of web sites in order to count users and to recognize users by accessing Yahoo! cookies.
# Yahoo! uses web beacons to conduct research on behalf of certain partners on their web sites and also for auditing purposes.
# Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners. This aggregate information may include demographic and usage information.
Now don't get me wrong, I like Yahoo!. But I am also super concerned about online privacy and I check my computer religiously for spyware, spamware, viruses and such. But this was the first time I had heard of web beacons.
I don't know about you, but I don't like the thought of a "beacon" shining out my information to whomever s willing to pay Yahoo! (or anyone else) to retrieve it.
But there is an upside. You can "opt out" of the web beacon program. You must do it for each computer you use, it will not work on all computers for one user name, but it is easy to do.
1.Go to the [Yahoo! homepage www.yahoo.com], scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Privacy Policy.
2.On the far left column, under "Special Topics", choose Cookies.
3.Once again, from the left column, under "Reference Links", choose Web Beacons.
4.About halfway down the page, you will see an underlined link that says "click here". Do so, and you will be brought to a page that says you have successfully opted out.
Or you can just click on the Web Beacons link above to get to the last step
No more web beacons!
Cheers!