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they are most certainly not the only ones...
and that 'opt-out' button in question just marks you as a special customer needing special tracking
btw Lycos is monitoring each and every forum that runs on their servers permanently with some sophisticated pattern matchers.

and honestly, I don't find it even funny that my phone supplier provides a mail-box for me - what does my private stuff concern them ?

a good idea to become aware of consequences of networking and telecom

cheers, Tom

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2005-05-17 04:36 ]</font>

If you think about the birth of the www, where it comes from....
Do you really think that the www was a present of good will only?

Edit: Oh, hopefully nobody is offended now, whoever read this.. hehe

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ChrisWerner on 2005-05-17 07:16 ]</font>

I wouldn't trust any service's opt-out, since that's only for a specific server.
You could check if there's a national opt-out, like here we have http://opt-out.be/ . That list has legal value here, and can include postal and email adress, phone numbers etc. Everyone sending out commercial emails should check that list and scrap opt-out list from their adressees. Theoretically you can then sue them if they fail to comply. Problem is that oversees spammers don't read that opt-out list and it's hard to sue them eh, but it seems to work at least for local junkmail.
I think we discussed that before, and the outcome of that was, if I remember well, not to use any of the large services. They /all/ do track you. So I stick to my ISP for email adresses, I have a contract w them and they properly filter or at least tag junkmail, so local rules can be set up for them.

Yes, in a way it's kind of ironic that after Nazi Germany, english speaking countries set up Echelon as a big brother to keep an (automated) eye on things.

_________________
more has been done with less

Well, after all, what the heck are they going to track? If they want to lose their lives out of my surfing, they can... as long as they don't bother me... There are millions of people surfing the net right now? What are they going to do with such information? I don't think they are capable of even following it.

I have edited my hosts file, the easiest and cheapest way so far to block ads in windows, which prevents tracking:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Get here the already modified hosts file with all the add servers:
http://accs-net.com/hosts/get_hosts.html

Read more about the hosts file here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1649060,00.asp
Check this page about security and anonymity (it is long!):
http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: BingoTheClowno on 2005-05-17 11:07 ]</font>

I considered that new Yahoo music service but decided I don't want all tht crap on my computer. If it was high quality downloads rather than streaming, I surely would go for it for $5.00 a month. Maybe one day it will be. Until then I am not buying music anymore.

On 2005-05-17 09:58, Nestor wrote:
Well, after all, what the heck are they going to track? ...

well, I just found a nice example - from the site of german mag (a 'respected' one, btw)

there's this box on the right side between ads and stock data, titled 'Money & Job' with items:

offers - one click to your dream job
income - do you earn enough ?
calculator - what remains from salary
gas - cheapest station close to your location
car finder etc

not much to comment - they've a session id and evaluate (as one example) who clicked the tax calculator and cheapest gas station - voila, an income profile of visitors ordered by location
they could corelate dream job to real income
preferred car brand etc

that's only the evaluation of one single side box - needless to mention they could (will ) track what kind of 'regular' news each group is interested in

of course that's all anonymous, but it would take only one single event to add a real world adress. This mag has the capability (at least for a small group of readers) already built in - they offer payed content.
They most certainly would wildely refuse they ever will, but it's almost effortless to corelate the 2 databases
And who is willing to pay for web content is a highly interesting customer anyway...

you can deliberately reverse the model for the 'subversive' part of the web

cheers, Tom