So, he hates Google knowing what he likes, but he doesn't mind that they have his phone #?
I don't think you browse like I do
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#12So, he hates Google knowing what he likes, but he doesn't mind that they have his phone #?
Google know exactly what I like, I'm sat in Gmail all day and have G+ open. And I own domains, everyone already has my name, email, number and address.
What I disliked were:
* Websites automatically changing state based on a cookie (forums that reset what it believes you've read)
* To be on site B and have what I viewed on site A appear (adverts over-personalising kept creeping me out thinking there was a relationship between disconnected sites)
* My searches being personalised (in the same way that Amazon recommended gets skewed by Christmas shopping, so my searches get skewed when my girl says "Can you just look this up for me", I also want to see other opinions so don't want opposing views filtered out)
But I didn't dislike those things enough to do anything about them. They're just small papercuts.
This browsing style evolved from using incognito and private browsing to assist web development, I continue to use it because it prevents all of the papercuts above.
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#13but what's he doing about the government mind rays? I have 14 different hats. I mainly use aluminium foil, but when entering passwords or other sensitive information I like to switch to pure tin, as that of course is most difficult to penetrate with mind rays.
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#14Your categories and demographics
No interest or demographic categories are associated with your ads preferences so far. You can add or edit interests and demographics at any time.
I don't browse incognito and I'm always logged in to google.
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#15This reminds me of the old days where people would encrypt all their emails, no matter how mundane, with blowfish. I'm pretty sure there must be some sort of inverse relationship between the effort you put in to hiding your comms activity and the amount of stuff you actually need to hide.
That type of encryption was more about preventing governments from reading all your communication. There was talk about ECHELON and similar data-traffic-trawling systems.
The "risk" to the average person from those systems was very low. (Ignoring, for a moment, the jobs lost to industrial espionage.)
But we know that gathering huge data-sets is important to many companies. Sometimes those companies are lawful (Google or Facebook) but sometimes they are unlawful (Russian criminal gangs). And even if they're lawful companies they may be using the data in bad ways, or not keeping the data secure.
It is amazing to see what people give up in return for "free" smileys or animated cursors or a shitty facebook game.
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#16This just really doesn't bother me, Google knows some stuff about me due to what I have told them and machine learning, they use it primarily to show me ads they think will convert better. This makes Google more money, the advertiser more money and makes it much more likely that the ads will actually be useful to me, pretty much win win win.
I don't think the problem is what do they actually do with all those data, but what could happen with it. You can't be sure that in few years, they will use data for something else that ads, something that you're not agree, but meanwhile data are collected. You can't be sure what could happen with Google's data in 5 or 10 years. Sold ? After all, Google is a company, here to make money. Or even some weird law, allow…
> After all, Google is a company, here to make money.
Those bastards... and they force you to sign in for their email and g+ and picasa and.. oh, wait.
Maybe I'll sound like a wierdo, but you can always opt out of using google at all and block them with ghostery or hosts. Problem solved. Let's be honest with ourselves and admit that data is the currency we pay for 'free' online services, and if we don't like the service or the 'price', we can just stop using it.
It's funny OP uses gmail and g+ but is worried about profiling for ad personalization. Btw there is google analytics on his blog.
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#17This reminds me of the old days where people would encrypt all their emails, no matter how mundane, with blowfish. I'm pretty sure there must be some sort of inverse relationship between the effort you put in to hiding your comms activity and the amount of stuff you actually need to hide.
That type of encryption was more about preventing governments from reading all your communication. There was talk about ECHELON and similar data-traffic-trawling systems. The "risk" to the average person from those systems was very low. (Ignoring, for a moment, the jobs lost to industrial espionage.) But we know that gathering huge data-sets is important to many companies. Sometimes those companies are lawful (Google…
I completely agree with you, but it matters what type of data we're talking about here. Facebook scared me off a long time ago with its policies and what it knew about me, but it's a different story with Google's personalized search. I don't worry about a company knowing my browsing habits. I worry about a company losing my credit card info or leaking my SSN or deleting my emails. Compared to those things, preventing Google from guessing my demographic via search analysis is pretty much meaningless.
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#18On Firefox, I use the RequestPolicy plugin: by default, it only allows requests to the current domain, so nytimes.com can't access connect.facebook.com. You can enable requests to go through, so that reddit.com can access redditstatic.com.
I think it strikes a good balance between blocking everything (a la NoScript) and total openness.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#19I had nothing listed under the demographics, which baffles me because I use chrome, always logged in search, gmail, g+, picasa, etc
Very quite odd that they don't profile me.
With that said, I obviously do not care if they know all this information about me. So the article is true in this case as I do not browse that way (too inconvenient)
Re: I don't think you browse like I do
#20Actually I browse a lot like this. So there.
Me too.
.bashrc:
alias cookies="/usr/bin/chromium --user-data-dir=$HOME/.chromium/cookies"
alias nocookies="/usr/bin/chromium --user-data-dir=$HOME/.chromium/nocookies --incognito"
alias chromium='echo "cookies or nocookies?"'