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Mmmm -- Christmas cookies.
If you dropped an e-bundle at Amazon.com over the weekend, your browser ate two. CDNow slipped you another. A visit to Wired News' sister site, HotWired, put two more on your plate.
Most online shoppers have heard about Net cookies -- those little exchanges of code that webmasters use to track your movements, mine user data for advertisers, and allow site personalization.
On Saturday, the Center for Democracy and Technology launched a new site called Privacy Watchdog to raise consciousness about sites using -- and misusing -- cookies, and other matters of online privacy.
"Recent polls show that privacy is a huge concern for the majority of people who shop on the Net," said CDT policy analyst Ari Schwartz.
Eventually, Schwartz says, Privacy Watchdog will be fleshed out into a database of information about privacy practices across the Web. For now, however, the site asks concerned netsurfers to answer a brief questionnaire about privacy policies on the sites they visit.
The site also offers randomly chosen URLs for inspection, based on sites mentioned on high-traffic lists like 100hot Sites.
Schwartz mentioned last August's dispute between the Federal Trade Commission and homepage giant GeoCities over the misuse of personal information.
