NationStates Jolt Archive

I'd never been too bothered by Internet privacy, companies that track my movements across the Internet - I clear my cache and cookies now and then, I run Spyware programs fairly regularly but it wasn't a pressing concern.

Today I read this article (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/07/opinion/edacohen.php) in the IHT, however, that has slightly changed my view, specifically this part:

Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.

("Hmm. . . . I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane's laptop?")

In some senses, a laptop is a far greater threat to privacy than I'd previously thought, despite all the details of my life that are stored here - emails, musical preferences, photos, in some cases 'remembered' passwords and more.

Yet I'd never thought of my habits being recorded in this way.

The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it's hard to know what a particular company's policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time.

There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS.

To some extent, I've never really minded cookies, if they help provide relevant information to me then I'm okay but then...

They're not telling you they're doing it, and they're not asking permission. Internet service providers, or ISPs, are now getting into the act.

Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that ISPs may have started to sell the information they collect.

Anyway, are we letting our freedoms slip quietly into the night, that we're releasing information about ourselves that, one day, could come back to haunt us?

What do you do to conceal your trawls through the Internet?

Have you heard of Phorm?

No amount of cache clearing will help against them. Your profile is linked to your IP address rather than a cookie.

I'm glad my ISP aren't heading in their direction for the time being.

When this computer dies, it'll be my last. Not that I don't like the internet, but I'll use the public ones where I work (at a library where there are dozens) rather than owning one.

Have you heard of Phorm?

No amount of cache clearing will help against them. Your profile is linked to your IP address rather than a cookie.

I'm glad my ISP aren't heading in their direction for the time being.

This is the thing, where it becomes more effort to remain private, where the hurdles you have to go through become far more than the average person is capable of - I begin to become concerned.

In some senses, I recognise that in a digital realm, if someone wants to invade my privacy there's ultimately not a lot I can do about it aside from switching off the Internet or, as TPC says, not owning a computer.

However, I feel it kind of sucks when it's not just someone with malicious intent against me personally but some kind of informal gathering of highly detailed information that, although not the reason now, can in future be used against me.

I have always had the distinct feeling that I was being monitored on the Internet anyway (I use google enough) and too be quite honest Richard Branson gives my Internet and he seems like a fairly bearable guy

what I'd like to see is TV commercials that work like this just to see what kind of guy TV thinks I am:)

I'm starting to feel like privacy will become extinct, it's inevitable and resistance is futile. We'll end up having annual mind readings, a tracker with microphone inserted into every citizen, a dust of nano cameras floating around in every air filled space or some equally effective surveillance eventually.

To keep privacy on the net a little longer, well it's easy to stay clean of spyware but it needs to become easier to use encryption(specially for email) and anonymizers.

I couldn't care less.

For one, I really have nothing to hide.

For other reason, I like targeted ads to me better than random ones (sometimes they contain smart my-industry-specific jokes or just fun).

And i don't know why somebody would use my information against me...

Will Google blackmail me of threatening to send my search history to my parents. Will Amazon.com not sell me religious books, because day before i had searched internet for lesbian pron?

What can they do?

just recently my own isp has started requesting to cookie my first thing i log onto the net.

now cookies keep track of where you've been and what you've done, and those from sites you freequently visit are useful because they enable the site to tell you what's there that you haven't already seen, and determine whether or not you have scripts or shockwave or other helper aplets enabled so as to avoid wasting your connect time trying to show them to you.

but cookies from ad agancies, and these days isp front pages have become nothing but huge advertising and even political propiganda billboards.

none of which amuses me, nor do i find remotely useful nor bennificial.

i don't log on to the internet to go shopping. i prefer to do that where i can pick up and fondle the merchandise personally and directly.

i'm only interested in connecting to not for profit forums on topics that interest me, and galleries of photos and artwork that interest me, and those to which i can post my own. and occasionally reviews of useful tecnological information.

that is what the internet started out to be all about. a universal free public library. the greatest ever conceived. that is still and will always be, meeting rooms included, what i want it for.

not, as it has been, to be overrun by right wing assholes trying to sell me a bunch of useless mundane comsumer crap that i have no interest in nor use in hell for.

if i want to go to a shopping mall i'll go to a shopping mall.

anyone trying to sell me anything is percisely what i consider to NOT be relivant. every personally creative NON comercial website is what i AM interested in.

exactly the opposite of what the internet as industry is insisting these days, on shoving down our, or at least my, unwilling, throat!

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