Tell people that you’re going to track their every move on a website, store that information in files and analyze it later, associating it with personal data received earlier, and the response might be, “Back off, Big Brother!” But that is not a paranoid, Orwellian vision of personal-data piracy. It’s simply what happens when, as you browse the Web, you (or your browser, without your knowledge) accept a “cookie” – a short bit of text that a website can store on a user’s machine (see box: The way the cookie crumbles). In other words, it happens every day, millions and millions of times over. In the West, fledgling Internet companies take turns detailing for an eager audience of electronic commerce executives and venture capitalist technologies that could more efficiently capture information about people on line – making their presentations without once mentioning the infringement on privacy. For example, online advertising
