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Amazon Search Bar Will Track Your Browsing
Limit writes "There has been a lot of discussion regarding GMail and Google's privacy policies. However, with the recent debut of Amazon's A9.com, I havn't seen any mention to the information they intend to collect. I saw this article today, "The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way ... If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well." Where is all the media hype about this privacy issue?"
Anyone who signs up for a "free" service without reading the small print deserves what they get, just like with any other 'unbelievably-good' offer...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The Google Toolbar does this also. I don't know about A9's, but Google's asks you when you install it if you want the advanced features, which require it to communicate back to Google.
There was a discussion on this topic a day or two ago. Take a look at this /. forum when you get a chance. Good stuff really. Many ramblings about the possible fallout of this type of info accumulation.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
Don't use it.
h at Choices and Access Do I Have?
Want to use it?
The full quote:
"The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way. Whenever you come to the site, we can show you what you searched for in the past in a very easy-to-organize fashion. If you want to hide some of that, you can opt out at any time. If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well. And we are working on many different ways to improve that."
You can opt-out.
Still demand your Constiutional Right to this private service?
From: http://www.a9.com/-/company/privacypolicy.jsp
"W
If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.A9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.A9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you."
Still not enough for you?
May I suggest: http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
See http://toolbar.google.com/privacy.html
You can turn it of by disabling the advanced features. It's part of what makes pagerank work.
Every commercial enterprise targets. Targetting is about making money and making money is about targetting.
... on and on ...
1) Malls: Malls collect information about the foot traffic, demographics and patterns of their customers. They can then position their rents according to the traffic.
2) Retail: They use loyalty cards, store credit cards and your regular credit cards to track and profile you. They know certain products sell better a week before paychecks are due and certain products sell better the week after paychecks are cashed.
3) CRM companies: Companies like Siebel / Onyx etc have extensive profiling options built into the software which are used my major corporations, govt groups and yes, when a sales guy finds out his customers birthday, wife's name and kid's school, he puts them in there are they're tracked.
4) Banks: You think for a second that they don't exploit young working people who don't have enough saved up and sell them expensive credit cards?
The list goes on
By the way, no one is brought up why my ISM using SpamAssassin is exempt from this whole invasion of privacy thingy... they have processes which reads my mail and makes certain decisions based on the content.
Pricing that (at least in my experience) will probably beat Amazon any day.
proxy server to block ads? can't this be done with the hosts file without any speed loss?
exactly: when you can just run firefox and have a google toolbar built-in but without any of the privacy concerns mentioned in this article, + block pop-ups + install any of many other plugins available.
According to this article it does if you have PageRank enabled. Of course, there's no way (at least that I can think of) to implement a PageRank-like system without having tracking usage.
Opera Has a search bar built in that you just drag down to select where your searching. It defaults to google, but theres AllTheWeb, super search, Amazon, news Search, TechTracker Search, and half a dozen others, wish there was IMDB search too, but anywho... This seems to be the functionality of both the Google and Amazon toolbars without tracking
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
There's Google Watch.
There's Yahoo Watch.
And there's also Amazon Watch.
Amazon's privacy policy is very explicit, and they do have the generic version available that doesn't track you. Anyone who fails to use the generic version is asking for a comprehensive, personally-identifiable profile at Amazon/Alexa/a9.com that they cannot review and cannot delete. Amazon is very up front about this.
All such profiling, whether done by Google, Yahoo, or Amazon, is presently justified by the Holy Grail of "personalized search." But who needs personalized search when the cost is so high to your personal privacy? This is what the focus should be on -- criticizing all those pundits who help the profilers by trumpeting the possibilities of personalized search.
After all, 99 times out of 100 you can "personalize" any search on any search engine by merely adding one additional word in the search box to limit the results that are returned. Personalized search is for lazy people, but even these people don't deserve to be cyber-fingerprinted everywhere they go online.
You don't let a two-year-old play with matches, and you shouldn't let programmers at search engines play with "personalized search."
God I love Mozilla! You want spyware free browser add-ons? Check MozDev's active projects.
Search-related projects on MozdevGoogleBar- Emulates the Google toolbar that only works in IE
Companion- Emulates the Yahoo! Companion toolbar in Mozilla.
Easysearch- Offers a search toolbar with more general coverage of many search engines.
ExPASybar- Searches the ExPASy database of biomolecules.
Mycroft- Collection of search plugins for Mozilla's sidebar search (formerly known as Sherlock)
Gimli- Another project to re-create popular toolbars, starting with a dictionary.
NeedleSearch- Allows users to search using search engines installed in Mozilla, or add a new search string to the toolbar automatically.
Pubmed- Searches the NLM/Medline database of articles and citations in the field of medicine.
Qlookup- Add Google search to the context menu
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Hmm...i think amazon plays a big role for many people out there. at least here in germany its THE internet book/cd/electronic/computer-parts shop.
theres nothing compareable to it (when it comes to easy (and cheap) buying goods online).
1. How long before someone writes an open-source google toolbar clone that will kill popups and allow you to search from the toolbar? 2. Does this exist already?
Yes, it's called Mozilla.
Or were you expecting programmers to waste time trying to salvage IE?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of