Most of these are usually either Microsoft or Google sourced tracking cookies to discover what we're doing and who we are doing it with, and this is presumably the price we have to pay for these "freebies" we get from them. So today's Question Everything is: "Is it worth it?" And how "free" are their programs or services if we have to spend money on various security programs to help us stay safe from harm which might be contained inside this spyware or supercookies?
You do know what a supercookie is, don't you? It's like a regular cookie on steroids - it never expires, and it can "phone home" with your information to its home base, because it contains an executable program which enables it to do that. And that's maybe the classic definition of "Spyware". The fact that it can report back to wherever it came from, and send home your information to people you didn't even know were after it from you. The information being collected might be relatively harmless to share, but the part that pisses us off is that we were not asked up front if we would mind sharing it. When someone comes along in effect saying "I'm going to help myself to whatever I want inside your files, and I don't need your approval and I'm not asking you first..." then, in the words of Bugs Bunny, "This Means War!" - And the battle is on.
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