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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
If you're logged in and you have it enabled, you can have Google tell you all of your search history. I disable that and generally block cookies from being stored by Google. I sometimes, depending on what I'm searching for, use inurl:nph-proxy.pl and find a random open proxy to search through or use a public facility like a SurfThing enabled coffee shop or library.
If my legal adversaries want to find out that I searched converting 3.5 tablespoons to teaspoons while cooking on Saturday, good for them. The rest of it is protected.
Now, what the general public does (like the moron that got busted for searching for how to commit undetectable murder and then poisoning her husband) is another story. No matter what, there will always be idiots that don't know how to cover their tracks regardless of the "privacy policy" of third parties.
Were things really much more private before the Internet as we know it today? You had to approach actual experts like doctors for any questions you had. That leaves a trail. And if you had checked out library books as research, I'm sure the government could trace those records as well, even before computerized systems. Technology simply makes the process shorter.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
You can find out more about me by rummaging through my trash can - quite legal too. Just make sure you get it off my lawn first, or say hello to my boomstick.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Don't forget to clear your cookies or block them from Google. The default Google cookie doesn't expire for 30 years, and with it Google can track all your activity on Google sites, from maps to gmail to search.
This is why I use different services for different things. While I absolutely love gmail, I don't use it for my primary webmail account. Instead, I use Yahoo! (though I hate those ads at the bottom of messages). This is because I use Google as my search engine of choice. And for messaging, I use AIM. I don't want companies to be able to attach seemingly disparate portions of my life together into a single profile. Sure, it can still be done, but diversifying makes things that much more difficult.
This guy's the limit!
javascript:x='Nothing';y='preferences';try{if(con
Or else, google for GoogleAnon
They (my nephews and nieces) look at me as though I am an brontosauraus wearing Sanjaya's fauxhawk when I talk to them about the dangers of "overexposure" (both literally and figuratively) in the internet.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Similar to the upcoming US election results
I hoped they purged my request to find "the clitoris" on google maps
The original generic sig.
Clearing cookies is great, but I'm not sure whether you're clearing cookies that will be saved, or cookies already saved.
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
There are precedents for suing yourself, so the door is open a crack. Actually, no matter what the TFA implies, I imagine that search history wouldn't be the most interesting piece of information you could find about yourself, if you arm yourself with a good subpoena against yourself.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
I have a VPN tunnel to a hosted dedicated server I setup as a proxy to my home connection. All my home traffic first passes through it encrypted. I share this box out to a few people. To establish connection with the proxy requires secure vpn. At home, I have 2 firefox items in my menu. One for my casual browsing, and another that connects to the proxy and request it to even anonymous communication even further using tor. This, plus not saving cookies beyond session helps me feel at least a little more secure that I can't be easily targeted. It also removes the case of my ISP being able to turn over anything useful on me.
If you live in the UK, then it *is* legally available to you under the Data Protection Act 1998 (for a maximum of £10). Under s.7(1).(a)(b)(c), they are required to give you a access to "the information constituting any personal data of which that individual is the data subject" (s.7(1).(c)(i)).
Go ahead and try.
I was in the process of refinishing my basement. It had existing cinder-block walls that I chose to leave partially bare along with conventional sheetrock walls which I added. So, not being clear if the same Latex based interior paint would adhere equally well to both types of walls, I googled for "Latex Bondage"
I got a lot of unrelated hits......
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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.
Edit > Preferences > Cookies > Keep until: I close Firefox
No jokes, please
Everyone concentrates so much on which services are collecting information and what information they are collecting. The next, and more important, question is rightly,"What are they doing with it?" I'm not talking about the generalized vague notion that everyone has: they're selling it. Yes, of course, but to whom are they selling it? Do they portion it out or do they sell the entire database in raw csv format any time anyone asks? Is there a subscription service to receive weekly or monthly updates to the dataset? Is there any effort made to screen the people who offer to buy the dataset to ensure that they will similarly protect the privacy and security of the consumers represented within it? Are there services which will cross-reference the various databases to infer data which cannot be directly collected for legal or technical reasons? Are there services which buy these datasets which offer to correlate them with tax records, grocery card clubs, and DMV records?
The answer to all of the above questions, of course, is "yes--to the worst extent possible and with absolutely no conscientious consideration for the consumer from whom the data is being mined". Take it for what it's worth. Twenty years ago the hospital kept records, the insurance companies kept records, the banks and retail outlets kept records, but they weren't so ready and apt to cross compile and sell those records to hundreds of political and fringe religious groups posing under infinitely ambiguous names such as International Financial Consultants, Ltd.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
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