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Watched by the Web
As more and more of your time is spent online, it’s important to realize that you aren’t just gathering content from the web, the web might be gathering information on you. Specifically, according to the New York Times article, “To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You:”
...large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.
Additionally:
“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”
It’s important to realize that increasingly, whatever you do online, is being recorded by someone, whether that’s your ISP or whatever service you’re logged into. That is, if you’re logged into Google and do a Google search, Google will remember that. The same is potentially true for any other service you’re logged into.
Another example is Yahoo:
Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites—about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.
For more, you can go read the article: “To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You.”
And for tips on protecting your privacy online, check out these ideas from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
— EFF’s Top 12 Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy
— Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy
Update (3/11/08): And following up on this conversation, the New York Times “Bits” Blog has a follow up on this topic: Where Every Ad Knows Your Name.
— michael | March 10, 2008 03:26 PM | Something to think about
