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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
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?
If my legal adversaries want to find out that I searched converting 3.5 tablespoons to teaspoons while cooking on Saturday, good for them.
Except when they list also includes "fertilizer" or "ammonia" and some guys end up locking you up and throwing away the room.
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
Do you really think that Google doesn't keep track of your past searches, just because you disabled it?
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
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.
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
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
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
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