made, right up there with the invention of the wheel, the airplane, and iced decaf cappuccino.
But as with many advances, there come problems (such as, "How do you keep a big head of foam when cappuccino is iced?"). Unscrupulous people and organizations can use the Web to invade your privacy, and you can accidentally download a malicious program to your PC via the Web. This chapter gives you the rundown on the main things you should watch out for. Then the rest of the chapters in this part of the book tell you how to keep yourself safe when on the Web.
How Your Web Surfing Habits Can be Traced
For you, me, and Web surfers everywhere, the Web is a great place because of all the amazing
information, resources, news, music, videos, and just plain fun you find online. We blithely (or not so blithely) point and click away, hopping from page to page and site to site, following our instincts and interests. (Want to know more about the mating habits of Arctic terns or where to go to collect old bricks? You'll probably find information about how to do it on the Web.)
For marketers and online sellers, the Web is a great place as well—in fact, it might be the closest they'll ever get to heaven. (And I believe that after they pass away, marketers are most decidedly not heading to heaven. Instead, they're heading to a deep, dark place that also happens to be very hot.) Marketers and online sellers can use the Web to track everything you do—and I mean absolutely everything—and can then use that information to put together a profile of your likes and dislikes, what you read about online, how often you tend to stay on a site, how long you stay there, and other information. Based on that profile, they can target ads to send your way, put together targeted email lists, and more.
Think of it this way: Every time you click, they can track what you're doing and can know all the topics you read about and more. In fact, just by examining your browser when you enter a site, they can find out information. Here's a list of the kinds of things Web sites can learn about you:
♦ Your email address. It's simple for a site to look into your browser settings and find out your email address. For information on how to stop a site from doing this, turn to Chapter 15, "Holy Cow! My Browser Shows All That Information About Me?"
♦ Your geographic location. When you enter a Web site, it often can tell—based on things such as your email address, IP address, and other kinds of information—what part of the country you're connecting from.
♦ What kind of business you're in. Amazingly enough, based on your IP address or email address, a Web site might know what kind of business you're in. Information in your email address can give this away—if your address is [email protected], for example, the Web site would know you are in the computer business. The Web site can buy a database that matches email addresses and IP numbers to types of businesses and can find out what kind of business you're in.
♦ What operating system and browser you use. Using Windows 95? Windows 98? The Mac? (Ah, an individualist, are you?) Do you use Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, and which version? A Web site can find out all these things in a snap.
♦ What site you just came from and what site you go to when you leave. When it comes to extracting information out of your visit, Web sites can get pretty sneaky. They can even know what site you were at before you visit, whether you click on a link when you leave, and where that link goes.
♦ How long you spend on the site. Do you show up, stay a minute, and leave? Or do you hang out for an hour? No matter which, the Web site can attempt to figure that out.
♦ What pages you read, what kind of information you're interested in, and what products you might want to buy. Web sites can track your every click as you go through the site. They know what pages you visit, and based on that, can put together a profile of what your interests are—even what products you're interested in buying. Spending a lot of time reading reviews of computer printers? If so, the Web site knows and realizes that you're interested in buying one. Expect an email or ad pitching you a printer.
♦ Other stuff, too. Internet programmers and marketers are pretty clever. I have no doubt that they've cooked up other schemes that haven't been listed here for finding out what you do on their sites. In general, it's best to assume that anything you do on any site can be tracked.
There are ways to make sure that Web sites can't grab this information about you. To learn how, go to Chapter 15.
Why Web Cookies Can Leave a Bad Taste in Your Mouth
When you visit almost any commercial Web site, it tries to put a little piece of information onto your computer—and you probably don't know that it's being done. For no apparent reason in the world, that little piece of information is called a cookie. So yes, your computer is filled with cookies, and they're not Girl Scouts or Famous Amos or Mrs. Fields. And some people think they're not very sweet.
Web sites put this information on your computer for a number of reasons. One big one is to make it easier for them to track what you're doing when you're on the site. They have other ways of watching what you do, but using cookies is just one more way to do it. And cookies can do things that some other technologies can't, so they're useful for that as well.
Often, cookies are used to identify you in some way to the Web site. As you move through the site, it may continually "write" to your cookie. (How romantic—writing to your cookie. Is that like writing to your sweetie?) When it writes to your cookie, it's putting in some new information about you or what you've done.
Cookies can be used to gather information about you and so invade your privacy, but believe it or not, cookies can be your friend, too. They can remember logon information for you so that you don't have to keep typing in a password when you visit a Web site—but keep in mind that this can be a security problem, because anyone using your computer can log on as you. Cookies can also give you extra services, such as being able to customize a site so that it looks and works exactly the way you want.
There are ways to kill cookies. You can configure your browser to ask you before accepting cookies or to never accept cookies—sort of an update of what your mother told you about never taking candy from a stranger. Special cookie programs, such as Cookie Pal pictured here, let you automatically accept cookies from certain sites, automatically kill them from others, and ask you when visiting at yet other sites. That way, you can accept cookies at certain sites that offer features you want and that are available only with cookies. But you can kill them at sites where no extra services are offered. For more information about cookies, turn to Chapter 13, "No, They're Not Oreos: What You Can Do About Cookies."
Cookie Pal: An eassy way to toss your cookies online.
The Dangers of Web Registration Forms
Any Web site worth its salt these days seems to have a registration form. Want to get a free email account or a free fax number? No problem. Just fill out a form. Want to enter a contest to win a trip to Maui? Just enter some information, right here. Want to get a free email newsletter? Put in your name, address, and more. How about entering a free, for-members-only area of the site? Just the facts about your life, ma'am, just enter the facts about your life.
Filling in registration forms is a fact of life on the Web today. If you want to fully participate in what the Web has to offer, often you have to fill them out.
So what's the big deal? If you don't worry about your privacy, there's no problem. But if you worry that your name, email address, and personal information will be bandied about, shared by marketers, and generally mishandled and mistreated, then you should worry.
The reason you should worry is that your name is worth money to Web marketers. In fact, it's as good as gold. Web sites make money on advertising, but the real money comes from people selling things to you. And if they know your name, your address, your email address, your income, your home address, and other personal information, it is easy for them to sell things. You could get deluged with email come-ons, phone calls, and other kinds of annoying offers.
Worse than that is that after a site has your name and personal information, you never know where it will end up, who will use it, and how it will be used. Sites can sell lists of names and personal
information to other sites or to direct marketers. Those sites or direct marketers, in turn, can sell them to other parties. Pretty soon, everyone knows your name and your annual income.
As if that weren't bad enough, sometimes the forms you fill out are not secured. This fact means that anyone can tap in to your personal information (such as your home address) as it floats through the Internet. A secured site prevents this snooping, but you still have to wonder how the site will use the information.
Does that mean that if you want to get all the neat services on the Web, you have to give up your privacy? No. There's a lot you can do, such as only filling out certain fields on a form, reading the fine print to make sure you're not agreeing to be spammed for the rest of your life, and checking out a site's privacy policy before filling out a form—and if a site doesn't have a privacy policy, watch out! You can see an example of a privacy policy nearby, as posted on the ZDNet Web site at
www.zdnet.com. Turn to Chapter 14, "Beware of Registration Forms on the Web," to learn the best way to handle filling out Web registration forms.
An example of a publicly posted privacy policy (say that five times fast!) on the ZDNet Web site at www.zdnet.com.
Beware of Viruses and Other Malicious Programs
Some of the neatest things the Internet has to offer are programs that you can down-load for free to your computer and then use. (Download means to transfer something to your computer from the Internet.) Many of these programs you can use for free forever; some you can only try out for a month or so, because they stop working after that; and still others ask that you pay after 30 days, but they still run after that time period.
Many people, like me, live to download. (In fact, I'm in charge of the ZDNet Software Library at
www.hotfiles.com, one of the biggest download sites on the Internet.) But there's a potential problem in downloading. Not all download sites check their files to make sure that the files don't have viruses in them. There's a chance that something you download can be infected with a virus, and it can attack your computer.
Viruses are programs that invade other programs and then launch themselves and do damage. If you download a program with a virus in it, the program you downloaded might appear to work fine. But after you run the program, unbeknownst to you, the virus gets loose and starts doing its nasty business. There are all kinds of viruses, from ones that do no harm at all and perhaps only display a taunting message on your screen to others that can kill your hard disk and the data on it.
There are many different kinds of viruses that work in different ways. The best way to protect yourself against them is to use a virus scanner—a program that detects viruses, and when it finds them, eradicates them. Pictured here is Norton AntiVirus, the one I use.
Better safe than sorry: Using Norton AntiVirus to check a computer for viruses.
Viruses aren't the only things you download from the Internet that can do bad things to your computer. When you visit Web pages, often there are things sent to you called ActiveX controls (sounds like The X-Files, no?) or Java applets (is that some kind of combination of coffee and little baby fruit?). They can do damage as well.
There are steps you can take to protect yourself against viruses, ActiveX Controls, Java applets, and any other nasty creatures hanging around the Internet. Turn to Part 8, "Protecting Yourself Against Viruses, Trojan Horses, and Other Nasty Creatures," to see how.