If Google isn’t Big Brother they’re doing a pretty good imitation. And escaping them is no easier than getting away from the Thought Police was for Winston. Once you understand how Google Web History works you’ll have a pretty good idea how all the others who are following us around work. Read more…
Before you start using any online method to grow your business - whether that be blogs, directories, social networking, advertising or any other method - you MUST understand how your activities online are being tracked so that you can control to which accounts your activities are being linked.
Bear with me because this is a very important concept that all Internet users really need to understand and absolutely critical to those who are using the Internet to promote their business, non-profit, personal interests or any worthy cause.
There is no way to know how many sites are in collusion to track your activities across the Net. Read more…
When most companies - and especially corporations - provide extremely desirable and advanced services without charging you it is definitely NOT out of the goodness of their hearts. You can be assured that there is always a profit motive - always. That is a given - the obvious truth; what is not so obvious is what the means of generating profit is. Read more…
You need to clearly understand how data mining works because it is already affecting your life and will do so much more in the very near future. It is simple to understand and if you’re reading this there is a 90+% chance you use it yourself every day. Any person who wants to know all about you can do a similar search across multitudes of supposedly private databases.
A search engine (Google, Yahoo, Ask - even my favorite Zuula) are all data mining services. You type in what you want to find and the search engine provides the information you’ve requested. It isn’t quite that simple as the search engines filter the data they provide. Filtering is used to eliminate some results and decide in what order the information is presented.
Since most people only view the first page or two, the search engine has great power to influence what information is widely viewed and what is likely to be overlooked. Some are taking this further and actually censoring what appears to be available online. For now we’ll focus on data mining though.
So why should you care about data mining? Try this example. Type in the name of any famous person in your favorite search engine or tool bar. Notice all the information that you would consider private that is available to anyone online. That is just what is supposedly publicly available. What do you suppose is in private databases on that famous person - and on you? Read more…
There was a furor when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy told reporters “privacy issues are a red herring; you have zero privacy anyway…get over it!” Many could not believe he would say that; however, he was simply stating the truth - an obvious truth to those with access to the many databases that contain your life - and more problematic - things that did not actually happen but got recorded as though they did.
Still believe we have privacy? Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said “The privacy you’re concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy.” They have both known about the erosion of our privacy for so long they apparently didn’t even realize their comments would be a surprise.
Why do they say we have no privacy? Do you know what information you think is private can be easily accessed? Read more…
