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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
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?
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
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