So I have to start by saying, unequivocably, that you shouldn’t be losing sleep fretting about whether the internet is affecting your privacy. Don’t even worry about it. Because the reality is that there no longer is any privacy: that ship has already sailed.
So how does one manage our equivalent of Big Brother?
A lot of the information captured on websites is done via cookies. Most (though certainly not all) cookies are generally considered harmless. Anti-spyware software will identify cookies and let you know about them, but deleting them is optional. Some anti-spyware software will also flag your MRU lists—these are the lists maintained in your system of the files most recently opened by a program (for example, the files listed at the bottom of the File menu in Word). In theory, particularly for computers shared by multiple users, these lists are a possible source of privacy breach, or at least embarrassment. So you have the option of clearing them, too.
Cookies come in two flavors, first-party and third-party. A first-party cookie is reported only to the site you are looking at. For example, it says that you’ve already seen book on style and marked it as a favorite, so when you go to the site again, it has a little box on the side that says “My Favorites” and has a thumbnail of the book on style. Without some way of keeping track of that information, it will just take you to the default home page every time.
If you register on a site–give your name, in other words–it might also say Hi
All of that is done with first-party cookies, small text files stored on your machine that you are free to delete if you want to.
Third-party cookies are used to collect information about what sites your computer has accessed and send that information to a third party, generally an ad service. While they do not usually contain personally identifiable information, nonetheless they are used to decide what banner ads, for example, you are most likely to be interested in, based on your past browsing behavior.
Third-party cookies are considered by many people to be spyware, and a lot of browsers are set up to reject them by default.
How does this relate to writing? Because as much as we’d all like to see ourselves as artistes far above the fray, it’s still important to know what’s going on under the hood. Because Big Brother operates best in secrecy, and knowledge is power. Know all that, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
