Cookies - It only takes one site to cause problems

This is the first frame of the video produced by Stephen Cobb. Please visit the blog post directly by clicking below, on his blog post title.

As marketing firms figure out more ways to use cookies to learn about how web surfing habits and possibly make it difficult for you to get any work done during the day, it is highly recommended to consider ways to block or remove cookies regularly.
There are settings in every browser that let you block different types of cookies and remove all cookies upon closing the browser. Unfortunately, these settings have to be adjusted manually.
A great example of how cookies jump on your machine is in the video at the eset security blog post by Stephen Cobb called "Cookie stuffing, cookie jackers, rip-off Victoria's Secret giftcard seekers"

His blog post also describes the modern jargon of what some of these cookie terms mean:

Cookie stuffing is an abuse of affiliate marketing cookies intended to mark a visit to a website that an affiliate has initiated, and for which that affiliate will get paid if the consumer performs pre-defined tasks, like requesting more information. The cookie stuffer acts as an affiliate and places cookies on a consumer's computer even if the consumer has not been brought to the site by the stuffer, later getting paid for consumer actions.
Click-jacking can be narrowly defined as deceiving a user into clicking on things they did not intend to click on, or clicks which lead to pages or actions other than those the user expected when clicking. This is part of the broader category of fraud known as click-fraud.

Stephen put together this great 4 minute video to show how using the Internet (in this example Google Image search) for researching free giftcards and coupons can lead the unsuspected shopper to a web site that will quickly fill a machine with web cookies. These cookies will monitor and track your web surfing habits.  If you adjust your browser to remove all cookies when you close your browser, this can help. But it may be the most prudent policy to not look at websites that you do not know, have never heard about or can't recognize, regardless of the supposed deal behind the 'research', like a housing auction that offers $100 homes.

Note: this is NOT the fault of Google. In fact, Google tries to recognize and shut down these sites as much as possible, but they are created at a very fast rate with always newer methods to avoid Google's detection. Making Google completely responsible for this is like blaming on a Road Commission for allowing convicts with a car to use a road once they robbed a bank.