Nik lives in Essex, UK and works in London as the editor of MacUser magazine. The posts and comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions of values of his employers.
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Following David’s advice, I download Ad Aware this morning and set it to work finding out what nasty little programmes had installed themselves on my hard drive without my knowledge. I was shocked to see how many things were tracking me. In all, 53 suspicious files or entries in my registry were found, and there were all sorts of cookies on my hard drive for ad tracking agencies (and even, surprisingly, sex site tracking agencies, which seems most unlikely on a work computer).
I’m normally very careful about what I install, so apart from the cookies which obviously lodge themselves into convenient corners of a hard drive whenever you visit a site I have no idea how most of it found its way to my PC.
Anyhow, I cleared them all out and so far there don’t seem to have been any dire consequences so I guess none of them were actually misidentified essential bits of Windows. It was an eye-opener, though - I’ve obviously been giving away far more information about my online habits than I realised.
The last two days have been full of meetings and content management systems. Neither are ever much fun. It’s been worthwhile, but it’s left me with loads of other things that need doing before I go off on holiday next week.
It’s all going to have to sit on my desk this evening, though. It’s gone seven, the sun is shining and the rest of the team is waiting in the pub. Laura has come back to see us all and as I’ve only seen her once since she left to go and edit her James Bond magazine (of which I am mightily jealous) I’m going to join them.
Fortunately, being at the start of a new issue, my bag is devoid of proofs, so I can spend the journey home learning my facts for tomorrow morning’s piece on the breakfast show instead of the usual revising in bed last thing, biro, earl grey and highlighter in hand, eyelids drooping onto cheeks.
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