Shopping Online While Protecting Your Privacy?

Bart asks: "How can you shop online and protect your privacy? I have been trying without success for a few weeks to shop at the online site of the bigest supermarket chain here in England. My problem is that either I am not using Internet Explorer or Netscape or that I have set up Junkbuster to return a spurious user-agent. With this configuration I can visit my bank, transfer money and make payments, I can visit my two stockbrokers and make deals of up to 100,000 USD but I can't go to Tesco and buy cat food." It seems odd that certain places require a bit too much information from you before they will even do business. What information do you think is fair for Web sites to posess on an individual, and how far do current e-Commerce sites cross that line?

"Protracted e-correspondence with Tesco (apart from regular instructions on setting up Internet Explorer) revolves around bypassing the proxy and setting up a direct connection. As shopping online for mundane things like groceries gets more common and less the province of technically aware people, we can expect more and more intrusions like this into our privacy. Can anything be done about it?"

Comments

Re:User Agent

[DrXym]

Some websites use the user agent to deliver "enhanced" (i.e. browser proprietary) content. For example, if a site knows you use IE it might draw the shopping basket as a fixed element instead of a frame etc. It sounds like Tesco is doing this too, though at the very least it should drop down to HTML 3.2 if it can't figure out what you're using.

The most annoying thing a website can do is refuse to work in such circumstances. The same goes for those shitty websites that refuse to work without a referrer URL.