GIF/JPG Tracking over internet

[Rod]

Just thought I'd let people know how a website can track your web habits via image placement on webpages.

A technique is making the GIF or JPG 1x1 pixel in size, however this causes browsers to show border.

The other angle is 5x5 but colour of background, so hidden.

What this does is allows the GIF to be loaded from a tracking website.

For example, with emoticons I noticed on certain forums such as ATS, the emoticons were based all over the place, some in USA, some GOV websites, and even Co-Intel-Pro sites.

When you load the page, the images are taken from that other site, and that site records your internet details to say you accessed it.

What this does is also allows the 'page referrer' of image link. so it will keep logs of the page you are accessing, reading, replying to, all details of web browser, operating system, screen resolution and other publicly allowed javascript information is sent.

If a website is linked via 50 sites, all 50 sites record data, and can grab database from each one and say 'Rodrigo visited this site, was on this page, and verified with other 49 sites, he is on conspiracy forums, and is talking about "Bring Hyperspace back to the people".'

Its basic mans Echelon.

Love
Rodrigo Leopoldo Soto

[simple simon]

Thanks.

Yes I know about this, and indeed yahoo groups even tells people that it uses what it called 'web beacons' such as these to track people who visit their site / receive emails from them.

But, many email readers block all images (including these) unless a person clicks a button or link top allow the images to be seen.

Simon

[arejay]

Everything you do on the web is tracked.

Each web server tracks everything.

Every time you load a image from any site a log is made.

We use this type of tracking to know how our ad's are working, how many people clicked, how long they stayed on the site , how long till they left, what pages they looked at.

But a better way is to use cookies, just like google does.

To see the scope of what is seen on the backend of all sites, you can checkout google.com/analytics to see the amount of data that one can get (and this is without using a pixel tracking system)

Heck any site with google adsense like this site is tracking you each time you load the page, because it uses Javascript each time you request a page on this site, its your IP/Computer doing that request, and mix that in with any cookies that get put on by this ad system and even tho you might not of clicked any ad, you have been logged.

Or like the statcounter code for this site, tracks you live ,which lets the webmaster watch what everyone is doing, including what pages you went to. But this is only done to provide stats for the webmaster here so he can see how his site is doing.

If anyone is worried about getting tracked then you should just stop using a computer on the internet. You will never NOT be tracked. And no matter what type of ways you think you can hide and not get tracked, you can and are.

Because it all comes down to who made/financed these technology's, which gives them full control on it.

edit: here is a link talking about google and its ad serving cookies, which is nothing more then tracking at its finest.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/07/goo...e-cookies/