Other uses, of course, include more, shall we say, slimy practices. These run gamut from selling your email addresses (to other marketers and spammers as well) to outright crimes such as fraud and identity theft.

Now don't get this wrong. There are valid uses for cookies, web bugs, and all of other things used to track customers. These include shopping carts, personalization and memorization of entry fields. All of these uses are to make things more convenient for consumer, which thus makes it more likely for people to return site.

In fact, many people have no objection to tracking of their surfing habits and maintenance of a profile. After all, these are used to show highly targeted advertisements, which means a customer will only, in theory, see ads in which he has an interest.

Consumers want to know how their personal information will be used, so companies started creating legal documents called privacy policies. These explain exactly how any and all information collected from a surfer or customer will be used.

Unfortunately, these privacy policies have become extremely complex and virtually unintelligible. I have seen policies which are over 100k in size (all text), which is ludicrously large. Thus, P3P was born to make this a little easier for consumer, and thus make him more comfortable with surfing and shopping on line.

P3P is, in my opinion, a good start. I really do like privacy feature in Internet Explorer. It does not, however, go anywhere near far enough. The XML document that must be created by webmasters is very complicated and extremely difficult to create and maintain. The XML documents must (at least until better tools are created) be maintained by webmasters with some technical competence. This means it is difficult for legal types to review and validate. In addition, since there must also be a human-readable document, it is awkward to keep two policies saying same things.

However, a start must be made and P3P is a decent attempt to do something to manage privacy. It needs to be greatly expanded to handle such things as web bugs, profile maintenance and so on. These things may be added in future. In meantime, those surfers who want to control cookies would be well advised to make appropriate settings. And webmasters would be well advised to become knowledgeableS about P3P and implement it for their sites.

Bandwidth Theft - Please don't like directly to my pictures, videos, sound files and other similar objects. You can link to my pages, but not to other things. This is called bandwidth theft, and it basically means you are stealing from me.

Changing my Browsers controls - Webmasters, please don't change my back key to back up to anything except previous page. Please don't disable right click function and don't do anything to size of browser window. It's rude and you can pretty much bet that I won't be back.

Free Hosts that Disable use - A new trend is free hosts which allow a certain amount of bandwidth to be used by each site per month. Once that limit is exceeded site is shut down until next month. This makes it really difficult for these free sites to survive, as they will drop from search engines and be removed from webrings because for a week or two they don't exist. Worse yet, most of these free hosts state bandwidth is a certain amount (say 2gb/month) but sites they shut down most certainly do not get anywhere near that much traffic.

Paid hosts that go to hell - Every single paid hosting service that I've used (about a dozen of them) started good and quickly went downhill. In hosting world, poor customer service, poor performance and rudeness to customers seems to be rule. Perhaps this is why they seem to be failing right and left.

Sites that include a statement like "Best viewed with" - A good webmaster makes sure that his site can be viewed (at least at a crude level) in any browser. Older browsers may only display text and text links, but site should still work.

Sites without site maps - This is like trying to read a book without a table of contents. Please take time to make a decent site map so I can get around your site.

Large Sites Without Site Search Engines - Sites with thousands of pages need to include site specific search engines. Why? Because it is not possible to have a navigation system that foresees everything I might want to find out. If you want me to use your site and it's large, then please include a good search capability.

Informational Sites with too much advertising - Look, I know some sites want to remain "free" and must pay bills somehow. And I understand that chosen dogma is that advertisers will pay for exposure. But do you have to include a half dozen banners, twenty links, three pop-ups, a pop-under and those silly monitors which fall from top of screen? Sites which do this would be better just charging people for access - if their content is good people will pay.

Sites which do not respect my privacy - I'm sorry, but you don't need my address, phone number or social security number unless I am doing specific kinds of business with you. And I am not going to tell you all about myself to fill out your silly survey. Just give me good content, a good shopping experience or good entertainment (whatever you are selling) and I will be happy.

And, oh yes, I do monitor where my information goes. If I find out my personal data has been given or sold to another company, you will NOT get my business again.