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What MSN, Google, Yahoo and AOL Know About You
hotgist writes "America's top four Internet companies, Google, Yahoo,
AOL and Microsoft's MSN, promise they will protect the personal information of
people who use their online services to search, shop and socialize. But a close
read of their privacy policies reveals as much exposure as protection. The
massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of
the searches you make, the health problems you research and the investments you
monitor, can be requested by government investigators and subpoenaed by your
legal adversaries. But this same information is generally not available to you."
Ok, if I can't find out what records they are keeping about me, but legal adversaries can, someone please sue me and then subpeona them for me.
BTW, TFA appears to have gone though a buggy porn filter. It has words like "cir*****stantial" and "do*****ents"
yawn...nothing you do online is private. The real problem here is that people *think* they cannot be seen.
TFA made an interesting point, though...searches are as close to reading our thoughts as is possible. That is pretty scary. I'll bet there's all kinds of predictive software that could use that search data to profile us, even anticipate our next move. That's pretty scary.
blah blah blah
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Which brings up an interesting idea - fake search patterns. On the one hand, you could perform all sorts of irrelevant, meaningless searches to clutter up your search record. On the other hand, imagine you wanted to make it appear that someone was searching for certain information, information that might prove incriminating. Assuming you could somehow gain access to their computer(s), wouldn't it be possible to "plant" searches in a person's search history? How many people who use the major search engines every day know they are being tracked?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Actually, I tend to save a couple of dollars every trip to the grocery store with it, and if the grocer knows my grocery habits, I really don't care. I'll spend time and energy protecting info that NEEDS protection, like bank account numbers and credit card numbers, not my preference for whole wheat bread over white or rye. If I don't want a particular purchase "remembered," I don't use the card and pay cash. There's a concern for privacy, and there's paranoia.
I'll agree with you though as far as Facebook/MySpace type sites go...before you post it on a web site, ask yourself this: Would you post it on a billboard along the freeway? Ask that, because that is exactly where it is going--on a billboard along the "Information Superhighway."
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I'd be interested to know if this information is covered by the DPA for UK residents. Does search data count as personal information if the data is linked to an IP address rather than directly linked to my identity?
If it is then presumably I should be able to make a request under the DPA (without a court order) and they would be required by law to provide me with all information they have pertaining to me for a nominal fee within a certain time-period (I forget exactly how long).
Clearly IANAL and I don't know nearly enough about the DPA or international law to know if this applies. Any actual lawyers about there who can clear this up?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Does anyone have any information on whether or not Track-Me-Not (which runs random searches against the big engines at random intervals) helps to confuse the trackers or not?
sPh
My grocer already knows my order when he sees me coming. Not that he gets them then for me. He already has gotten them ready because he knows when I arrive.
Invasion of privacy OR bloody good service I happily pay his slighly higher then average prices for?
God I love corner stores.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have a business T1 link from AT&T ..., but I'm under no illusions that AT&T won't still keep track of stuff.
Maybe they don't, but I have to assume that they do.
One of the bits of advice from very early in the history of the Net is: Forget about network-level security; the only way to prevent unknown others from copying and analyzing your traffic is to do end-to-end encryption. Even then, they can learn some things by analyzing your packet headers, which can't be encrypted. And, of course, the other end of any connection can keep a copy of anything you send them. You should assume that anything you send or receive has been copied by random unknown actors. The only security you have is making it difficult for them to decode the content.
In particular, ISPs, phone and cable companies, and other comm companies can and do store and analyze any data that passes along their lines. If you think otherwise, you're just naive. They are for-profit corporations, and if information about your traffic can be sold, they will do so regardless of any silly laws.
All of this has been understood from the earliest days of the Net. You can't run a network without doing at least some collection and analysis of the traffic. It's impossible to diagnose and fix problems without doing this. And when top management finally realize what the techies routinely do with the traffic, their eyes light up with dollar/pound/ruble/yen/etc signs.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It wouldn't be too hard to create a script to randomly search on 5000 different terms a day from a dictionary. Then it would be nearly impossible to see that you were searching for actual info or an automated script did the searching.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs