I was getting annoyed by those “nosy” ads again, the ones where you go to a website to do research, or buy something, and suddenly their ads are on almost every other site you see. Normally, my brain just “tunes out” the ads, same as in a newspaper, but one image kept showing up so often I looked at it and recognized a purchase from a week ago.

I’m not sure of the exact mechanism of this, but I suspected cookies had a lot to do with it. Symantec sweeps my machine frequently to rub out “tracking cookies,” but I thought I could help out by cranking my IE “privacy” setting up another notch. I took it from “medium high” to “high.”

It’ll probably be a while before I notice any ad changes, but one change that was immediate was that a lot of legitimate websites, especially secure ones, stopped talking to me. Like my bank. WordPress. Credit cards.

I’m not talking about them not “remembering” me–I’m talking “you can’t log in.”

I was talking to my bank support line, who couldn’t figure out why I was coming up “site unavailable” since she had no other complaints or outage notices. That’s when the cookie problem hit me. Some places NEED cookies, and my new security setting was blocking ones it hadn’t before.

Easy fix: The IE Privacy manager has a button that says “sites.” I enter problem addresses in there, and then it remembers them.

I haven’t noticed any of the websites that was being blocked having anything on their “login failed” page that implied that cookie acceptance might be a login problem.