Watch out--the spam choking your e-mail in-box may be loaded with software that lets marketers track your moves online, and you may not even be aware that you've been bugged. . . .

Watch out--the spam choking your e-mail in-box may be loaded with software that lets marketers track your moves online, and you may not even be aware that you've been bugged.

Web sites have long planted bits of code called "cookies" on consumers' hard drives to tailor Internet pages for returning visitors and better target ads. Now, enhanced messages that share the look and feel of Web pages are being used to deliver the same bits of code through e-mail, in many cases without regard for safeguards that have been developed to protect consumer privacy on the Web.

"All of the security and privacy issues on the Web now relate to e-mail," said Adam Shostack, director of technology at Zero-Knowledge Systems, a Montreal-based privacy and security company. "The shame about this behavior is that it's going on surreptitiously and people are not given an obvious way to opt out."

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