Embarq, WOW Bury Snooping In Terms Of Service → What cookie from where ?

I'm curious to know how they can get their cookie into your computer. Cookies are put on your computer by the web pages you open in your browser. If they are forging cookies and injecting them into into the traffic stream from the pages you visit, I can see where there are real problems. If not, then what is the big stink about ? If the web pages that you visit are co-operating with these advertisers, then guess what, you are already being tracked anyway. Nothing new going on here.

The issue is that the sites are NOT in collusion with the ISP, the ISP is looking at your data before it gets to its destination, and then looking at it again before it comes back to you.

And you get the opt out cookie by visiting the opt out site from the ISP (as far as I understand).

I'm going out on a limb here because I don't really know 100%, so if anyone actually knows how this works, please chime in.

That given, I think that how it works is not with cookies at all. It looks at your traffic and deduces in some way what kinds of things you are interested in buying, what web sites you frequent, and what your demographic is. This information (stripped of anything that could identify you personally) is then sold to advertisers, who use it to target you with advertising that you will (presumably) respond to more often than if they picked you randomly.

The cookies only come in if you opt out. The opt-out decision is captured in a cookie, so the system can remove you from tracking (or at least from reporting information).