Looking Up Symptoms Online? These Companies Are Tracking You

merbs writes When we feel sick, fear disease, or have questions about our health, we turn first to the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project, 72 percent of US internet users look up health-related information online. But an astonishing number of the pages we visit to learn about private health concerns—confidentially, we assume—are tracking our queries, sending the sensitive data to third party corporations, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor our credit scores.

Comments

Re:Library computers even worse

[tlhIngan]

Besides, whatever you may think of corporate efforts to pierce through your anonymity online, you are certainly not anonymous to the nice librarian ladies â" without any efforts on their part.

Except librarians typically are of the freedom loving kind - they see the government intrusions are doing what they can to stop them.

Your signing In on the library computers is likely destroyed by the librarians as soon as you leave, if not by the end of the day - by not having the records, it means the librarian can honestly answer that they have no idea who used it yesterday.

It's happened with book lending records - after a bunch of government requests on lender history, libraries started routinely destroying the record after the book is returned.

Re:Trackers on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Ghostery. I see on Slashdot:

DoubleClick Advertising
Google AdWords Conversion Advertising
Google Analytics Analytics, Analytics
Janrain Widgets
ScoreCard Research Beacon Beacons, Analytics
Taboola Widgets, Video Player
Zedo Advertising

I block all trackers on all sites. That way nobody knows about mt STDs