This is an old story, but it has a new twist to it which I have noticed only recently. When I was visiting my favorite torrent site I noticed that they are using Google Analytics as their site analysis service. I found it very strange. Not only does google track my online habits on their search engine, they can now track me on none google sites as well. It all started 2 years ago when google opened up Google Analytics, till then a paid service, for free use by the public. Till then it cost about $5k a year for websites to have similar web analytics and this was a real treat to a lot of websites.
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Nothing new here, but it does a nice job of showing how many major sites use Analytics.
- 3 votes
nah but it bears reminding.
there are plenty of browsers, firefox plugins, apps that will prevent tyhis data from being associated with you.
rememeber when the data was released by aol, without any usernames, people were still easily identifibile..
most of you probably think so what if they know i like naked midgets covered in whip cream, but havent any of you searched something, maybe to support a comment or what ever, and without context the search could look very weird or bad?
I' mean i have searched things like uranium suppliers, nambla, assassinate bush.. taken alone sounds like i'm a pedophile terrorist set out to get bush.. rather than a commentor that likes to get his info right when he talks about when saddam was going to try to assinate bush sr.
Just saying once in a while step back and look at your web habits and think 'if noone knew what i was doing, would i have to explain this". if answer is yes then you probably want to us an anonymiser or atleast no cookies, etc.. see they arent nessarilly for illegal activity, just like privacy doesnt mean i am hiding something.
and if you log into google, you can check out your web history for years, it can be quite creapy..and i have often thought "why the heck was i searching for that" and it isnt very hard to identfy me, simply look at my map history and where 90% of my trips searches start at.
- 5 votes
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