EKGs buy clindamycin low cheap price can predict a person's risk of a heart attack — order ventolin it cannot calculate anyone's exact risk nor completely rule out buy cheap betnovate online the potential for a heart attack. A heart perfusion imaging generic clindamycin info scan can help doctors understand whether chest pain is due buy ampicillin online to CAD or another cause. Instead, treatment involves a multidisciplinary price of arcoxia care team that works to improve the person's quality of clonidine tablets life. Allergies occur due to the body mistaking a harmless cheapest tizanidine online substance as a threat and following up with an immune cialis buy online system response. The number of treatments and types of medication buy azor without prescription may also vary from person to person, depending on the online viagra type of cancer they have. Doctors can diagnose the condition order cialis overnight delivery with a physical exam and medical history, but blood tests and.

As the New York Times reported last week, Google now keeps track of what you’ve been searching for in order to show you more relevant advertising. So if you’ve been asking about various islands in the South Pacific and you search for “Java,” you’ll likely get advertisements for travel offers, not for guides to the programming language by the same name.

Google’s technology for achieving this effect involves leaving cookies on your computer. But the article notes that Google already had access to the previously visited site, even without leaving a cookie. That’s a standard part of the HTTP protocol for web browsers. Click on a link, and the browser dispatches to the web server not just the URL of the page it wants, but the URL of the page that contains the link on which you clicked.

That datum is called the “referer.” (Yes, the word is misspelled that way in the HTTP standard. Oh well.) This is what makes possible some interesting customizations of web pages. For example, if Joe’s Books has a site that links to Blown to Bits, we could greet people who visit our page from Joe’s with a distinctive message such as “Thanks for coming over from Joe’s Books!”

Now this is all wonderful and a little disquieting. Such tricks make the experience more personal, and perhaps more informed. But is that what we really want? Do we like knowing we are leaving tracks that others know about? And if not, would we rather have them know about the tracks but not tell us that? 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.