In an entertainingly lucid rant, b3 studios <[email protected]> wrote:
> All of this started to sour a bit last year when Google implemented their new > privacy policy. I was okay with it then, but more and more I'm leery of > giving the company any more of my information. If you're on the Web in any form, it's hard to do this. Google Adwords is the most common form of advertising on Web sites. Visiting one of those sites tickles Google Analytics. Google is not the worst. Go to a site like dictionary.com with Ghostery active and see the list of 18 trackers that comes up. All of these companies have a database entry for you and they sell their tracking information to other companies like Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and even Google. Upload photos to any of the photo sharing sites. They're tracking you, and many of them analyze your photos looking for that picture of Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower to add to your profile. Next time you visit Amazon or AOL, you'll see travel offers because you had a photo of the Grand Canyon on Flickr. Almost all the big sites use Web bugs in different forms. The most common is a single pixel buried somewhere among the myriad of pictures. It links to an advertising tracker. Just looking at any page on such a site will tickle a tracker to add another link to your advertising chain. Are you sure Apple isn't doing the same things? We know for sure they share some information with Adobe because Ghostery tells us that whenever we load an Apple site. Their privacy policy sure doesn't make it clear who's able to look at their tracking information. Here are a few choice passages: <<<<< Apple’s website, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use “cookies” and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. We also may collect information regarding customer activities on our website, iCloud and MobileMe services, and iTunes Store and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non-personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy. Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising. >>>>> The only way to avoid this stuff is to climb into a hole and pull it shut above your head. "You have zero privacy … get over it." — Scott McNealy, CEO Sun, 1999
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