There are new ways of finding out what sites you are visiting - and, fortunately, a way of stopping this snooping.

The music you listen to and websites you visit are of interest to advertisers. If they can track what you do and then tell your computer to pass them the information, they have your profile. It allows them to target merchandise at you. They like to call this ‘adware’ or ‘trackware’ but we all know it as spyware.

The source is often freeware. If you are the sort of person who reads the small print, you will be told that if you accept the useful free programme, the spyware will be attached. It is one way for such programmers to make a living.

The spyware usually comes in the form of cookies. Most cookies are ethical and will only send the information when you link to the host site that deposited the cookie. But why should you allow anybody to peek?

Having spyware cookies attached to your computer means that they can track your surfing habits, abuse your Internet connection by sending this data to a third party, profile your shopping preferences, hijack your browser start page or pages, alter important system files, and, worst of all, they can do all of this without your knowledge or permission!

In the US, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act 1998 forbids websites from collecting personal information from those under 13. This has curtailed the activities of the data harvesters. http://www.cdt.org/legislation/105th/privacy/coppa.html

But there are some good guys out there. Ad-aware from Lavasoft, based in Sweden and Germany, provide a package that will check for cookies with a taste for your data.

http://www.lavasoft.nu/support/download/ Ad-aware is freeware which you can use to find, quarantine and eliminate spyware. You can use it, then check the names of the cookies and see how many have the word ‘advertising’ in their filename to find out exactly how many of them are tracking your data for advertising purposes.

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