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DAVID LYON is professor of sociology at Queen's University and the author, most recently, of Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Open University Press, 2001) and Surveillance as Social Sorting (Routledge, 2002).
Each time you log on to the Internet you are involved in a much broader information exchange than most people realize. Using the latest surveillance technology, someone else can track each click of your mouse, survey each web site you have visited, even read your e-mail messages and rifle through your financial records and legal correspondence. And the new century will see even more omniscient technology developed. As far as the Internet is concerned, you are an open book.
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IN 1994, Lou Montulli, a 24-year-old employee of a small company now known as Netscape, inadvertently made history. He was trying to solve the problem of users returning to the same web site, which until then was a fresh experience each time. The system had no means of knowing you had visited before; the commercial transaction had to start from scratch after every log out. What he devised was a means of giving memory to the web. The web site would send a small file to the user's machine which would then track what the computer did at that site. For some reason Montulli felt moved to call this a "persistent client state object," but they are commonly known now as "cookies."
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Thus the web became what its name suggests - not merely a rich network of interactive sites, an environment for learning, conversing, coordinating activities, and trading, but a means of trapping the unwary, of constraining the choices of the unsuspecting. Cookies - and their more advanced descendants, such as web bugs - send messages to web sites, reporting the clickstreams of users, ready for combination into user profiles. From the moment Montulli's ideas took hold, the Internet became a World Wide Web of surveillance.
But what does this mean? The context, after all, is above all one of consumption, of online advertising and purchasing. Surely free choice is the credo of consumerism? Yes, but as Manuel Castells rightly indicates in The Internet Galaxy, "The transformation of liberty and privacy on the Internet is a direct result of...