I’ve just been informed of Google’s changes to the way they monitor your web traffic, to help target their advertising partner’s adverts in a more targeted way.

This on the plus side should mean more appropriate adverts based on your browsing preferences (if you’re in to that sort of thing).. on the negative side, it means cookies are being used even more invasively to watch where you go. (Much like facebook ads can be very much based on ‘wedding photography’ if you change your status to engaged.. other general adverts advertising apparently ‘dating’ sites in your town based on your IP address, etc..) )

It’s kind of like your supermarket clubcard, being used to monitor all of your shopping habits, and then sending you ‘special offers’ because they know, based on previous years trends that someone’s birthday is coming up.

Also similar to the Nectar card being used for whatever they like, to share all of your spending habits with anyone they choose, and not giving you the chance to opt out of having your details shared.)

This is one of the reasons I always recommend friends and clients to move their browsing habits to something like Mozilla instead of Explorer, and then set the privacy settings to remove all cookies & temporary files after closing the browser.

Thankfully, Google have helped pre-empt the backlash, by developing a couple of plug-ins (for Mozilla & Explorer) to block the cookie while you browse:
http://www.google.co.uk/privacy_ads.html
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

If you have any questions that arise out of any of information above, please do get in contact.