Yesterday’s New York Times had a pretty good article about the inevitable upcoming revision of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

One of the most interesting bits in the article, though, had nothing to do with COPPA: It was the mention of Ghostery, a Firefox plugin that, as their home page describes it, “tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.”

Installing Ghostery will open your eyes. You know that Big Brother is definitely out there, but did you realize to what degree he’s watching? This Mashable page, for one example, has 21 items noted by Ghostery.

Some of the items that Ghoster notes are genuinely benign. This blog post has 5 items called out by Ghostery: AddThis, Feedjit, Google +1, Google Analytics and Twitter badge. Not a whole lot of nefarious stuff happening here.

Still, it’s very much worth the few seconds it takes to install Ghostery. You’ll never look at the internet the same way again.

This is not too good. Unless, of course, one believes Facebook’s denial.

Well, this is pretty appalling.

I click a link in an email I received via Google Alerts and am taken to a website, but before I can actually view the page, I have to click “not interested” to a pair of roadblocks preventing me from seeing the page.

Really?

For a moment, can you imagine what the web would be like if even a tiny percentage of sites adopted such a scheme?

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re considering adding this type of functionality to your website or, worse, if you’re engaged in selling this boneheaded idea to websites, you need to be taken out and flogged.

Here’s a pretty good primer on how to gruntle them.

It’s right here, according to the Web Marketing Association.