How private are you on line?

[warmonger]

Okay, so what you're saying is that it's simply a preference, like what colour you prefer or what your favourite food is. That there's no actual objective reason to care?

There's probably an element of this in it but it also has at least 2 other components, at least for me:

As someone said earlier, I don't like bots assuming I will like "this thing X" just because I showed interest in "that thing Y" earlier. I've been online since 1995 and one of the joys of the early internet was just the completely random nature of what you stumbled across. I like to preserve at least some of this - it broadens my mind.

Secondly, whilst the storage of massive amounts of data on me by corporations or governments may be relatively benign at the moment, I can't help wondering how it could be used under slightly different scenarios.


Even with my efforts to maintain a low profile on-line, something really weird happened a couple of months ago.

My wife is the only senior executive in Europe for a listed US tech company. She appears on their webpage as being based in Switzerland. One euthsiastic analyst tried to generate a good "pump and dump" story by google search. He found the Swiss phone book where we are listed as Dr War and Mr Monger with our address and phone number available. A search of my name and address turned up the public records of the Swiss company register where the various Swiss companies that I have been a director of were listed. Based on this info, he published a speculative article suggesting that my wife's company was planning to do a big deal with a major Asian company in the same field purely because she lived with a former director of a few Swiss subsidiaries of this Asian company. He achieved his objective. The share price of the little tech company had a nice little blip as the day traders picked up on the article and the analyst would have made a decent profit.

What could google do with the data it stores?

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Isn't the safest thing to pay for a IP-hiding service if you want anonymity? Isn't this what ties your internet person to yourself? I'm not sure how safe this is, but it feels like a decent option if you need more anonymity.

Myself, I use: Adblock, donottrackme, noscript, duckduckgo. Firefox and macOS. The camera is taped too Plus, I probably have the most boring internet habits among us

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Anyone looking at my recent activities would notice a revolving diet of online golf, arguing with anti-vaccine zealots, captioning cat pictures, and running this week's avatar contest in one of the sub-forums on TrekBBS (after years of entering those, I finally won one, so I get to run the next one ).

Oh, and Knowlton Nash died. (think Canadian equivalent of Walter Cronkite) The CBC comment boards are sad tonight.

 

[Zelig]

Isn't the safest thing to pay for a IP-hiding service if you want anonymity? Isn't this what ties your internet person to yourself?

No. Nobody on residential internet connections get static IPs. They generally cycle on a regular basis (every few weeks) or when you reset your modem. Some ISPs share a single IPv4 IP between many customers.

 

[plarq]

There's probably an element of this in it but it also has at least 2 other components, at least for me:

As someone said earlier, I don't like bots assuming I will like "this thing X" just because I showed interest in "that thing Y" earlier. I've been online since 1995 and one of the joys of the early internet was just the completely random nature of what you stumbled across. I like to preserve at least some of this - it broadens my mind.

Yep, big data destroys everything, restricting your life inside 3 sigmas.

BTW, how to escape from surveillance? Besides using several hopping TOR routers?

 

[Phrossack]

Not especially private, but I keep quiet about some of my beliefs.

 

[Cutlass]

There's probably an element of this in it but it also has at least 2 other components, at least for me:

As someone said earlier, I don't like bots assuming I will like "this thing X" just because I showed interest in "that thing Y" earlier. I've been online since 1995 and one of the joys of the early internet was just the completely random nature of what you stumbled across. I like to preserve at least some of this - it broadens my mind.

Secondly, whilst the storage of massive amounts of data on me by corporations or governments may be relatively benign at the moment, I can't help wondering how it could be used under slightly different scenarios.


Even with my efforts to maintain a low profile on-line, something really weird happened a couple of months ago.

My wife is the only senior executive in Europe for a listed US tech company. She appears on their webpage as being based in Switzerland. One euthsiastic analyst tried to generate a good "pump and dump" story by google search. He found the Swiss phone book where we are listed as Dr War and Mr Monger with our address and phone number available. A search of my name and address turned up the public records of the Swiss company register where the various Swiss companies that I have been a director of were listed. Based on this info, he published a speculative article suggesting that my wife's company was planning to do a big deal with a major Asian company in the same field purely because she lived with a former director of a few Swiss subsidiaries of this Asian company. He achieved his objective. The share price of the little tech company had a nice little blip as the day traders picked up on the article and the analyst would have made a decent profit.

What could google do with the data it stores?

I think these concerns are valid. But I also think that the solution has to be a government solution. And there's a lot of reason to think that one will not be forthcoming in the foreseeable future.

 

[warmonger]

Looks like both sides of the Atlantic are taking an interest in containing big data.

From today's NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/t...light-on-data-collection.html?ref=todayspaper

There was a similar article in the Guardian yesterday about EU efforts but I can't find it at the moment.

 

[KMRblue1027]

No. Nobody on residential internet connections get static IPs. They generally cycle on a regular basis (every few weeks) or when you reset your modem. Some ISPs share a single IPv4 IP between many customers.

It does depend on the amount of people in the region though. When I was living in the Pine Barron just a couple months ago my IP never changed in 6 years but moving to a more densely populated area it's changed 6 times in about 3 months.

 

[innonimatu]

It does?

At the very least, wasted time you could have spend socially.

More than that really, because if you really want to prevent facebook from knowing your interests, you can't use it and can't have your friends posting anything about you either. Just clearing cookies and sessions won't prevent much of the data collection done by that company.

Collecting information just through scripts and cookies is so 20th century...

 

[Borachio]

Not especially private, but I keep quiet about some of my beliefs.

Yes, you do! (Or at least you've said so more than once before now.)

Which is just a tease. And makes me want to know what they are.

 

[Commodore]

Yes, you do! (Or at least you've said so more than once before now.)

Which is just a tease. And makes me want to know what they are.

Don't we all have those though? Those few topics we have strong opinions on, but we would never think to share those opinions.

I know there's a lot of opinions I won't share and I even give some false opinions from time to time.

 

[illram]

Since my name gets googled sometimes for work related reasons, I try to limit the google association between my name and anything not strictly manicured. I don't care too much about FB since I keep tabs on its privacy and, there really is nothing on there other than tame family stuff. So I only want it private for the purpose of keeping my family private, not because I have anything I want to hide.

Now, regularly posting on a gaming forum... that is something to keep in the deep recesses of my internet closet...