Blogs On Internet Privacy

Just avoid going online ****faced or unstable & you'll be less likely to make an ass out of yourself same goes for life in general.

I've had a moment or 2 where I've been a tad unstable & now I know to just go & excercise until I'm totally knackered, get some food watch something fun then sleep & wake up fresh as a daisy & carry on, it works .

But about facebook I'm still very much on the fence about it & probably always will be.

 

Use something like Ad-block plus in FF, no more ads to worry about anyway.

 

My assumption was based on (many) successfull people beeing successfull networkers, though this doesn't necessarily mean using facebook.
This is not the age of the lone inventor anymore.
I don't know anyone in my surrounding that's gone up the career ladder without some serious help from their network.

To you second point, yeah, that also freaks me out.
I cannot see a way to avoid this though.
The technology to recognise faces from pictures and link them to name exists.
Now there are picture's of me with my name on them on the Internet that are perfectly harmless (from my company, for instance, from the boyscouts, somewhere I suppose).
I suppose I'll be surprised someday.

Heck I've found pictures of my dad from the early seventies on the web, and he sure didn't put them up.

 

I have to say ads bug the crap out of me, and the personalized ones are even worse. Case in point...

I'm looking at which kind of boat to build next and have hit Guillemot Kayaks site a fair bit recently. Now when I pull up Bit I sometimes get a Guillemot banner ad at the top of the screen. For someone who doesn't like ads period, this is particularly annoying. If anything, ads tend to put me off buying the product because I resent them shoving it in my face.

I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account because my ego is not so large as to think anyone cares what I did last weekend.

As for funding the web, I don't have an answer, but I know there is very little on here that I would be willing to pay for.

 

And as if on cue Metro publish an alarmist Facebook article

 

A good, well balanced and thought out post.

The internet as a whole is in the public domain, so any information out
there is open to be used how whoever wishes to use it. If people want to remain anonymous then they have that choice. If they wish to post their real names and personal information about them and then complain about how that information is shared then they should consider what they truly value as personal and private.

As far as advertisers and the like go, there does need to be an agreeable solution put in place that people can sign up for rather than simply be bombarded with irrelevant advertising or even just because an advertiser sells something you happen to like.

 

Wouldn't say it's alarmist. They have a short, measured quote from Sophos and a short, measured reply from Facebook. What's alarmist about that?

Really depends on whether Facebook are doing their usual and setting the default to "share" without asking users. If they're not then I'd agree there's pretty much no story here; going on previous form though I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what they're doing.

No smoke without fire.

 

Yes facebook struggle to provide a free service out of the goodness of their heart.

They provide this service free out of their spirit of humanity. Revenue streams are only in place to cover the costs of this non profit making charity.

We should feel bad about restricting their misuse of our personal information. They only do it to aid them in their philanthropic efforts to provide social networking for the masses.

Face book like Bit Tech is a commercial operation who like every business in the world has one over arching goal - to turn a profit. This is not a bad thing you understand - not at all, it is simply how our society is set up to work - a free market economy.

But don't try to tell me for one minute that these services are provided for our benefit and that revenue streams such as advertising are in place just to cover costs.

You offer a service. We pay for it and you profit from it. It is that simple.

Perhaps we do not pay directly from our wallets. What we do is give air time on our screens and in our homes to the adverts you put on your site. This generate revenue from advertisers. This revenue maximises profit for the shareholders of Dennis Publishing Limited. It is that simple.

Users of face book like users of bit-tech are paying customers and their private information should be treated with respect and protected by law.

 

I'm not sure about overseas, but in the US, more and more employers are doing background checks... Many just simply inputting your name into Google, others Facebook. Others go full bore with credit checks and more.

Many of these employers are not hiring over this and in some cases flat out firing people for what they have put online. Sometimes, it's not even their fault. All someone has to do is post a picture of you and link it back to your "safe" profile.



While you say "no one is that important" to that I counter, why are you important enough to warrant your own webpage?" My personal life may be boring, but no one else needs to see it either. Besides, I've had enough, crazy internet stalkers to last a lifetime.

 

Since the advent of 24 hours News this is the approach taken on every subject, not just the internet, unfortunately.

 

The problem for most people debating this is lack of knowledge - a lot of the data collection (and virtually all the subsequent processing) happens behind the scenes so there is little visibility, no choice and therefore no opt-out.

Facebook (and other social networking sites) likely deserve every piece of flack for the way they operate (encouraging users to submit as much data as possible then making it impossible to restrict since it is the "Friend with the most permissive security settings" that effectively determines access) but user stupidity is a powerful factor also.

However I doubt many posters here will be aware that Omniture monitor Nvidia driver downloads and Nvidia forum posts (via web-bugs for nsomniture.nvidia.com) as well as posts in Electronic Arts' forums (via EA's Omniture javascript page which then triggers access to eaeacom.112.2o7.net). Omniture have also in the past had web bugs on American Express and Paypal webpages (the latter allowing Omniture to see the IDs of those making and receiving payments) and, for some reason, currently monitor TreeHugger (via discctreehugger.112.2o7.net).

However the Big Daddy of Internet Snooping is Google. As well as being able to keep track of searches made (by anyone allowing Google to set cookies on their system), Google has a partial view of almost everyone's online activities obtained by aggregating data from Doubleclick, GoogleAdServices and Google AdWords (those running ad filters will avoid this) and Google Analytics (a free service providing pretty graphs for webmasters, but allowing Google to track visitors to a significant portion of the World Wide Web).

And Google Analytics can also track online purchases. If you've bought anything from Scan, then Google will know, as will Yahoo Analytics since Scan use them both (and have used other tracking services previously).

Even blocking cookies by default doesn't completely block tracking for people on a static IP address (which most broadband users will be) since browser fingerprinting can be used instead - an anonymity network like Tor coupled with web/ad filtering would be needed to stop this.

 

^haha, google IS big daddy and tru dat re: facebook. thanks for the savvy post.

 

Just an update, to add some info relating to Bit-Tech itself. Bit-Tech webpages (for the website, not this forum) include beacons for ScoreCardResearch (b.scorecardresearch.com, aka ComScore) as do Dennis Publishing's other sites (listed at the bottom of the page for those curious).

ComScore is also used on other tech sites like Ars Technica and Slashdot, news sites like BusinessInsider and Digg as well as games sites like GameFAQs, EuroGamer and HookedGamers. A longer list of participating sites is given here but is a little dated.

ComScore provide an Opt Out page and Bit-Tech/Dennis should at least mention it on their privacy page (this currently links to YourOnlineChoices which provides opt-outs for 20 advertisers, but not ComScore - and *sigh* it uses Google Analytics...).

 

Well dont be my friend,THE ARTICLE IS CORRECT!!

Its becoming quite hard to remain private (Especially users from the USA) and people dont even try to make it harder for them,they use S/W designed to spy on people like Chrome or facebook..... Those are just 2 things used to keep track of people,spy on them,etc.......

You CAN remain private but using OLDER SOFTWARE is the first big step in achieving this! (Software that came out BEFORE the intrusive phase started) -- Makes it harder for them... (And anything able to do that IS A PLUS!!!)

 

Hmm...while there is good sense in avoiding some new items (like mobiles running Android or Apple's iOS which track users' locations) I wouldn't recommend that as a general strategy since there are plenty of cases of product updates offering privacy (and security) improvements.

Instead I would suggest the following checklist:

• Set up your web browser to block cookies by default (and avoid any browser not offering such an option). Only allow cookies for sites where you need to identify yourself (like forums or e-stores) and restrict these as much as possible (e.g. for this forum, allow cookies for the domain forums.bit-tech.net rather than just bit-tech.net). Check what cookies are being held periodically to ensure that your settings are working.
• Some sites (like Amazon or eBay) offer a search function - consider clearing that site's cookie before using it since they can otherwise retain details of any searches and link them to your account (eBay have stated that they retain every detail of users' activities).
• Use a web filter to disable active content (Java, Javascript, ActiveX, Flash) by default - only enabling them on sites you trust. Aside from reducing their abuse (Flash's local storage for example) this will also reduce the chance of you falling victim to a website compromise (many involve modifying a popular site to pull content from another location under the attacker's control - blocking active content by default will provide protection, even if a "trusted" site is affected).
• Ad servers have been targeted by malware pushers in the past (examples here and here) - an ad filter can therefore provide security as well as privacy benefits.
• Ensure the filters you use work on https: content - most don't (examples of filters that can handle https include Firefox extensions and Proxomitron, when configured with SSL DLLs).
• Consider using an anonymity network like Tor or JAP - these can defeat browser fingerprinting (see above) and prevent your ISP from snooping on your online activity (as has happened with British Telecom and TalkTalk in the UK). There are downsides to such networks (slower speed, more complex setup, some sites will block access) but there are few other measures effective against ISP-level snooping.

 

New study released showing extent of web tracking and (ab)use of Flash cookies, HTML 5 storage and ETags here.

Quoting from that site:

Abstract:
In August 2009, we demonstrated that popular websites were using “Flash cookies” to track users. Some advertisers had adopted this technology because it allowed persistent tracking even where users had taken steps to avoid web profiling. We also demonstrated “respawning” on top sites with Flash technology. This allowed sites to reinstantiate HTTP cookies deleted by a user, making tracking more resistant to users’ privacy-seeking behaviors.

In this followup study, we reassess the Flash cookies landscape and examine a new tracking vector, HTML5 local storage and Cache-Cookies via ETags.

We found over 5,600 standard HTTP cookies on popular sites, over 4,900 were from third parties. Google-controlled cookies were present on 97 of the top 100 sites, including popular government websites. Seventeen sites were using HTML5, and seven of those sites had HTML5 local storage and HTTP cookies with matching values. Flash cookies were present on 37 of the top 100 sites.

We found two sites that were respawning cookies, including one site – hulu.com – where both Flash and cache cookies were employed to make identifiers more persistent. The cache cookie method used ETags, and is capable of unique tracking even where all cookies are blocked by the user and “Private Browsing Mode” is enabled.

More commentary at TheInquirer: Sneaky online tracking used by major websites is exposed

 

I have tested this before and i only have problems on a few sites,most i stay logged in regardless!!! (VBB sites will assign a session ID if they cant set a cookie (And its usually slightly faster loading i have noticed!!))