Slashdot Mirror
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.
217.34.56.44 --> common cold
118.36.78.88 ---> headache
46.37.47.88 ----> slashdot beta
?
surprised I'm not dead yet.
Man mine must look horrible. I've looked up things from House, Grey's Anatomy, Breaking Bad (meth), things I've read about on slashdot, CNN, pretty much anything I ever was curious about.
They either think I'm a hypochondriac or that I'm a druggie with dozens of diseases and ailments.
Companies are tracking you. Period. Whatever you do, on whatever site. That site and its partners are tracking you — as much as you can be identified, that is. And before you blame "KKKorporations", ask yourself, why a page like this has elements from AddThis and Google Analytics...
AdBlock to the rescue. Sort of.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
we did?
confidentially, we assume
Well there's your problem!
Are you paying these companies for access to their information database? If you're not paying, YOU'RE THE PRODUCT.
. . . confidentially, we assume . . .
Why would anyone assume that? How clueless does someone have to be in 2015 to not understand that nothing on the internet is private, ever, in any way. It is a public place. Do not do anything on the internet you would not do in your front lawn.
okay - everyone within 10 miles of a nuclear reactor start searching for symptoms of hallucinations of aliens and swelling in only the right pinky toe. Maybe throw in random deafness every 10 minutes lasting for 30 seconds.
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
So you wondered, as a long time smoker, why you were denied a Life Insurance policy or maybe a job?
Replace "smoker" with "diabetic", "downs syndrome parent", "thyroid issue" (obesity), etc etc...
Once that box is opened, all bets are off as to what can be denied. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'm a chiropractor. I often look up conditions patients report they, and not limited to musculo-skeletal conditions that I treat. (Did you know that syphilis can cause "brittle bone disease?" Something that's good for me to know).
Anyway, if they assign my searches to my personal profile it's probably rather confusing: I'm a 72 year old man with possible Alzheimers's, Paget's disease, acne, whiplash, maybe a victim of child abuse, Guillan Barre, fibromyalgia, who fell off a horse and dislocated my coccyx, but this was before the onset of my first menses a few weeks ago right after I gave birth to my second child.
I'm probably black listed from everything!
Ordinary cookies are rarely a problem but web bugs can be. These can be found at slashdot. Some sites have 20 of 'em. Ghostery seems to stop them.
Google AdWords Conversion: Advertising
Google Dynamic Remarketing: Advertising
ScoreCard Research Beacon: Beacons, Analytics
WebTrends: Beacons
...omphaloskepsis often...
Under the GOP system anything can get you blacklisted and the ER only covers so much
It doesn't seem like there's any way to know whether I'm googling afflictions of mine or had by family members or friends. (Many of which obviously apply to the other sex.) How is that supposed to work?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Since this is related to personal health issues, could they possibly be in violation of HIPPA privacy requirements?
When I clicked on this story, I checked my Privacy Badger listing. It showed 3 trackers operating on Slashdot:
b.scorecardresearch.com
cdn.taboola.com
googlea....doubleclick.net
I'm using Privacy Badger (from the Free Software Foundation) to block all three.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Why does my browser visit these websites when I only want to visit slashdot?
dice.com, fonts.googleapis.com, fsdn.com, google-analytics.com, googletagservices.com, janrain.com, ooyala.com, rpxnow.com, scorecardresearch.com, taboola.com, zedo.com ...
Here is one https://epicbrowser.com/
I, for one, find web-browsing without AdBlock to be suffocating nowadays. Upon coming to an unfamiliar site I usually spend a few minutes to add its stable of 1x1 "images", anal ytics, and new relics to the black list. I then remove the elements (divs, headers, footers, and sections), of cruft, as well as the site's own spelling of "social sharebar".
Once only the article's text and, possibly, article-specific illustrations remain, can I get down to reading it — a luxury rarely obtained on a government-provided computer.
Besides, whatever you may think of corporate efforts to pierce through your anonymity online, you are certainly not anonymous to the nice librarian ladies — without any efforts on their part.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Not perfect, nothing is... but NoScript blocks tons of these. Also double check your cookie settings, and remove anything you don't know. In fact I'm looking currently at Slashdot having 7 other sites want to give me content. I have allowed 3/8 because that is the minimum to post, and I can guarantee that every remaining connection would attempt to dump a tracking cookie in my browser.
If you want to be really bothered, try looking at CNN or Fox News with no script on. nearly 30 other sites are trying to track your activities on those.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Not really about electing, one can only go along with the installation. The choices are always owned before being placed on the ballet.
I always use Chrome's Incognito Mode when looking up symptoms from myself, and regular mode when I look up symptoms for someone else (or something I saw on TV). So WebMD might think I have an ectopic pregnancy, but they would be wrong.
Use Adblock Edge. By hiding what it was doing, Adblock Plus has killed itself.
By hiding what it was doing when it sneakily adopted Microsoft Bing search, calling it Yahoo search, Mozilla Foundation has done irreparable harm to Firefox. Mozilla Foundation seems to be driving users to the Pale Moon 64-bit version of Firefox with Adblock Latitude.
Replace "smoker" with "diabetic", "downs syndrome parent", "thyroid issue" (obesity), etc etc...
Or good ol' curiosity. Whether you (the general you, not you personally) are ok with this or not when it comes to.. for lack of a better word.. dealing with people with such conditions, I think we can all agree that there is no way to tell if the person doing the searching has such conditions, or is simply curious.
Use Ixquick. Simply go to Ixquick and search for, say, "WebMD blisters" and once results paint, click Proxy. No tracking...
Well, why should the NSA be the only ones who get to have any fun?
Wish I had mod points. This has been one of my problems with the whole NSA scandal - it has taken eyes off of the bigger problem. Even as people think of protecting themselves from the various Three Letter Agencies, they forget about the ones that end in ".com".
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Seriously, how many things do you look up out of curiosity, or for a relative or friend, or because your favorite TV character supposedly contracted it, or ...
Or is researching something a family member, friend, acquantance, etc has.
I'm fortunate to be healthy as the proverbial horse, but people I know have come down with some nasties lately, and I've done some research to try to understand their conditions.
Assuming people only read about ailments they have is rather stupid.
http://someonewhocares.org/hos...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Replace "smoker" with "assembling search terms for patent searches for drugs for different diseases every week" I
Why are you "disappointed"? Would you like for it to be illegal for you to prefer an able-bodied babysitter for your child over someone, for whom you'd have to install wheelchair railings and lifts throughout your house?
A lender getting "burned" will have to recoup his losses by charging the rest of us slightly more. If you want to help others dealing with a financial crisis, you are welcome to spend your own money on this charity. But instead you argue for the power of government to be used to that end. Talk about ethics...
So much for "information wants to be free"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Using the internet for checking health problems is just guaranteeing a self-diagnosis of cancer, in my experience.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So you wondered, as a long time smoker, why you were denied a Life Insurance policy or maybe a job?
Insurance companies don't care whether you're a smoker. Their actuarial tables enable them to calculate the additional premium to ensure they still make a profit in the long run.
It's all based on statistics, not individuals.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That's true. If a friend or nephew committed suicide or has brain cancer, there is a good chance you may google info about those items. Someone looking at your searches could easily incorrectly assume you are contemplating suicide or have been diagnosed with some disease. Perhaps people need a startup file that does 10,000 random searches on diseases, terrorism, health foods, travel to Neptune, etc. That could hide any real searches and bury legitimate results.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Bullshit like this is ruining the internet. When shit like this is going on how can anyone feel safe doing any sort of research on any subject at all?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Do you also change up your computer's monitor resolution and color depth on a regular basis?
Er no, does anyone?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Here I was afraid they were analyzing the webserver logs. This makes it look like my habit of *NEVER* even temporarily allowing google analytics in noscript is a good one.
mark
Not me. I asked myself why WebMD was being operated, and I figured that anything I searched for was going to end up in Google or somewhere like that.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell