Big Microsoft is watching you
No sooner had I posted about Google patenting psychological methods of tracking you than I ran across an article about Microsoft doing something similar. New Scientist reports:
If you thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent others from working out exactly who you are.
That is the spectre raised by new research conducted by Microsoft. The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. But experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places.
If I understand correctly how these things work, the way to circumvent all this prying into our lives is to keep our Internet caches and history clean and to keep removing tracking-cookies. You can set your browser to keep the cache and history clean and I have discussed how to manage cookies at this link.
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Comments
Here is another thought regarding be anonymous on the web. How about running Firefox with the Tor extension using a virtual machine such as Mocha5 LivePC ?
Yes, proxy services will hide your tracks but they tend to slow things down. I haven’t tried Tor. Is it fast? If you delete your virtual machine or clean it up, then you should be OK but how is that is different from keeping your regular browser cleaned up? One advantage of a proxy service is that it hides your IP but I don’t know how much use can be made of an IP from a big ISP except to locate you geographically unless the ISP keeps your IP unchanged for a fairly long time.
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How about using Tor and Privoxy when surfing the web , to be anonymous? Would this not prevent Google, Microsoft, and others, from tracking you?