Internet privacy a growing concern.

For the most part such tracking is benign, even helpful. But as Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., noted at a recent hearing on the subject, it's also a little bit "creepy." She had, as an experiment, searched online for "foreign SUV" and when she visited an unrelated website 10 minutes later, she was served ads for foreign SUVs.

The surveillance is intrusive, pervasive and largely unregulated. Most consumers haven't a clue how much information about them is being gathered and stored for sale, nor do they have a reliable way to stop it. Even computer experts we interviewed were flabbergasted by recent Wall Street Journal reports that the 50 most popular Internet sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files (commonly known as "cookies") on a test computer the newspaper set up. Dictionary.com, of all places, had the most tools; Wikipedia.org was the only site among the 50 to install none.

Other tracking tools can also record the key strokes a visitor types, telling trackers not only where they've been but also what they've said while there. Even those savvy enough to block or erase cookies can be tracked by "flash cookies," which breathe new life into old cookies even after users think they've deleted them.

Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-08-09-editorial09_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip