Willie Sutton, uttered that famous line after a long career of bank robberies a century or so ago. He would have loved the Internet.

This topic was first written about in January over Internet click-through ads. I said that unless I know the website to where I am being pointed, I just say no. Now with pingbacks and auto-generated SPAM comments to this website used by others to build their web-traffic, it is meaningless whether I say no or not.

With the dozens of web-crawling tools constantly monitoring and moving about, the idea of Internet security is more of an oxy-moron (two words that do not go together) than jumbo shrimp and it’s downright frightening.

When the FBI announced they’d busted a ring of thieves controlling 40-million credit card numbers and passwords, I was became worried. When the UK MoD (Ministry of Defence) announced that more than 600 MOD laptops along with CD’s and data cards from dozens of other agencies including the Home Office had gone missing, some with important security and personal identity stealing data on them, I became afraid.

Encryption software during a Web transaction is at its highest level ever but that isn’t where the problem is. The problem is inside companies where hackers attack and steal data or… employees who sell this valuable data.

Too, the privacy cost of surfing the web is becoming very high indeed. Nearly all websites immediately download some form of recognition software or “cookies” to your computer. If you go into your browser’s cookies list you see hundreds of them if you surf a lot of sites. Most are the recognisable sites you visit. And somewhere on the list appear names controlled by big ad company cookies. These are the ones that scare me because of their size and ability to share and mine my viewing behaviour on the Web.

Double Click - now owned by Google and others show that very large players are in this game and everyone wants to own both the search and advertising business sides of the Web. BT Broadband uses Yahoo! and I often think of changing to a more obscure ISP but the hassle of changing e-mail address accounts holds me back. They know this hassle will keep me in inertia.

Cookies are probably the most benign things out there. Initially designed to make return visits load easier on your machine and created long before ADSL and cable, they now monitor everything one does on the Web with frightening accuracy. Since nearly all of us have abandoned 28.8 dial-up modems and now have 300-10,000 bps from ADSL or cable providers, they’ve mostly outlived that functional utility. It’s one of those things no one bothered to fix (like keeping the NumLock key on after you boot your machine).

Then someone realised these cookies could work both ways and they became tracking cookies, little streaming snitches (for lack of a better word) that send your web viewing history into databases to be statistically mined. If you’ve ever noticed the little transmission icon between your machine and the ISP sending data when you have not yourself pressed send me a new page or received data, there’s a good chance it is a microburst from a tracking cookie going off into some database.

It’s getting out of hand though and is partly how an advertiser can tell your Internet Service Provider, computer type, operating system, processor and connection speed, whether or not you live in an affluent neigbourhood and then from these data profiles they get a scarily good guess of whether or not you are male or female, approximate age demographic, and it just keeps burrowing or mining data down until it finds a profile match for you, then retrieves a targeted advert and pops it on your screen and… it all happens in about a 1/billionth of a second.

While the cookies are harmless to our computers, I’m getting tired of everyone gathering data on me and knowing where I go next on the Web. The “download these cute smiley icons” and flashing “you have won a free _______!” sites are the worst!

The free programs: Adaware SE and SpyBot daily flush them out and repair them. Some of these though have longer half-lives than Uranium-235. Visit a website, they’re baaaack.

Even fairly reputable and longer term players in the ad biz create things so insidious they know where your cursor pauses on a page and for how long. In theory, this tells them your ad viewing time and the technology in this area is just becoming downright spooky. What’s next? Micro-implant cameras on my screen to check my REM eye speed and subconscious behaviour/thoughts?

It’s all a bit too creepily 1984 for me and is it really the price I must pay to visit the Web.