Pallas Anonymous Remailer <athena@cyberpass.net> writes:
Netscape's "what's related" is a backdoor for Netscape to monitor your surfing.
The original poster didn't even quite understand the magnitude of the problem, which I believe is quite severe. PRIVACY has been covering some of the issues related to this, especially in issue 07.17. A much more detailed description of what's going on and how to manage the problem is in our paper "`What's Related?' Everything But Your Privacy", online at <http://www.interhack.net/pubs/whatsrelated/>. Abstract: Netscape Communications Corporation's release of Communicator 4.06 contains a new feature, ``Smart Browsing'', controlled by a new icon labeled What's Related , a front-end to a service that will recommend sites that are related to the document the user is currently viewing. The implementation of this feature raises a number of potentially serious privacy concerns, which we have examined here. Specifically, URLs that are visited while a user browses the web are reported back to a server at Netscape. The logs of this data, when used in conjunction with cookies, could be used to build extensive dossiers of individual web users, even including their names, addresses, and telephone numbers in some cases. Keywords: Privacy, world-wide web (WWW), Netscape, Alexa, smart browsing, what's related. -- Matt Curtin cmcurtin@interhack.net http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/