Article 30773 of alt.security:
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From: cburian@eehpx28.cen.uiuc.edu (Christopher J Burian)
Newsgroups: alt.privacy,alt.security
Subject: Re: Netscape Corp. logging uses of its products?
Date: 10 Oct 1995 18:22:37 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
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Bill Hensley <bhensley@oceo.trw.com> writes:

]It's not the cookies that you have to worry about.  In a (I think it
]was) _Communications Week_ interview a week or two ago, the head
]of Netscape admitted that Netscape knows each and every time that
]one of their browsers is started and from what IP address it
]starts.  

Only if you pull up their homepage.  Change it in preferences.  Also, you
can avoid getting cookies if you're paranoid by, as soon as you click on
ACCEPT license agreement, immediately hit STOP on the menubar before it
has time to complete the transaction.  Then, right away, go change your
preferences for what page to pull up at startup, and don't click on the big
N from then on.  This also keeps versions from expiring (as happened on the
computer I'm sitting at right now where the sysadmin is too busy to install
the newer version).  Once your Navigator knows it's expired, the only way
I know to unexpire it is to reinstall it, and then don't let it phone home.

I don't think there's anything sinister going on, otherwise it wouldn't 
be so easy for a know-nothing like me to defeat (for instance, the Navigator
would refuse to run without having talked to homebase, or it would call up
homebase every time you started it behind your back, and without letting you 
turn the callup feature off, etc.).

Chris Burian