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.
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.
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?
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?
There's lots of stuff I feel fine doing on my front lawn, but not on the internet. Well... felt fine. Fucking invasive Google cars show up at the most inopportune times.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
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
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.