Privacy
New cookie controls in Chrome browser
All major Web browsers have some sort of controls for managing Internet cookies but some controls are more fine-grained than others. Google’s Chrome browser now has the ability to control cookies for individual sites. It also has a link to the site for controlling Adobe Flash cookies. The video below has some details.
More about the loss of privacy
The discussion of how the Internet acts to reduce privacy continues. Steve Lohr at the New York Times has written an article, How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time. Computers can assemble and analyze the various facts that people post about themselves to create a revealing picture. Lohr writes:
Computer scientists and policy experts [...]
Privacy died and no one cared?
It is a commonplace observation that privacy in the modern world is dead. But what is also being said more often is that most people don’t care. Declan McCullagh of CBSNews.com has an article at CNET, Why no one cares about privacy anymore. He writes:
Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in [...]
Google everywhere
No longer just a search engine, Google seems to be everywhere. In fact, the word “empire” is an apt description. Just how apt is described by the following video clip. It shows how Google has expanded into omnipresence:
Why your search results may differ from someone else’s
That search engines want to tailor your search results according to personal preferences is not news. They’ve been doing that through cookies for some time. But you may be surprised by the extent that searches are personalized. According to a post at the Register, Google says that it is using a combination of things to [...]
Protecting privacy on the Internet
The Internet had already greatly reduced personal privacy and the social networks have now made privacy almost extinct for many. Various privacy policies have been used on the Internet from the beginning but the more recent developments have made new approaches necessary. At the New York Times, Steve Lohr writes about changing privacy policies:
On the [...]
How to find out what they know about you
It isn’t just advertisers tracking you. There are a host of companies aggregating all sorts of information about many aspects of your activities. The companies then sell the information to whoever might be interested. The Consumerist has a list of the many reports on your life that are available. Here are some of the categories [...]
What do behavioral trackers know about you?
It’s no secret that advertisers want to track what you do on the Internet as much as possible. The more they know about potential advertising targets, the more they can tailor ads so they will attract interest. In fact, there are repositories of extensive data gleaned from tracking cookies. If you would like to [...]
What Microsoft didn’t want you to know
What got Microsoft’s hackles up when Cryptome published the document, “Global Criminal Compliance Handbook,” that a previous post reports about? What was it that Redmond didn’t want us to know? It seems that the details of the information that Microsoft collects about us is a touchy subject. In fact, Microsoft may know more about us [...]
Google Buzz makes privacy advocates irate
Google’s venture into social networking that it calls “Buzz” is creating a different kind of buzz than Google intended. The New York Times reports:
When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail [...]
Yet another way to track you
And this one is ominous. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is experimenting with something called “Panopticlick”. This program puts together all the bits and pieces about your system that can be gleaned from the information that your browser reveals and constructs a sort of electronic fingerprint. It turns out that the exact combination of such things [...]
