Stalking.htm: How to search the web, by fravia+ stalking. Email Tracking: It Gets Worse. When I wrote Monday about the new didtheyreadit.com privacy-invading email tracking system, I had no idea that an even more invasive system has been on the market for two years or so. This system, called readnotify.com, was pointed out by commenter Brian Parsons. readnotify.com is an email tracking system that uses Web bugs (like didtheyreadit) and also uses a trick involving IFRAMEs (unlike didtheyreadit). The IFRAME trick cannot be disabled by the standard countermeasure of turning off remote image loading.
There may not be an easy way to disable it in today’s email software, short of turning off HTML email entirely. Worse yet, readnotify offers a service that lets anyone put hidden tracking bugs in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other OLE-compliant document formats. The vulnerability in Word that readnotify exploits was discovered back in 2000 by Richard M.
The Dangers of Web Tracking - The Great Privacy Debate. In a 1963 Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren observed that "the fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual. " The advances have only accelerated since then, along with the dangers. Today, as companies strive to personalize the services and advertisements they provide over the Internet, the surreptitious collection of personal information is rampant. The very idea of privacy is under threat. Most of us view personalization and privacy as desirable things, and we understand that enjoying more of one means giving up some of the other. This tradeoff has always been part of our lives as consumers and citizens. Even though the Internet is a very social place, we tend to access it in seclusion. But our sense of anonymity is largely an illusion.
Google Lets Users Opt Out Of Analytics Tracking, But Doesn't Expect Many Will. Google has announced the launch of a browser plugin that lets users avoid being tracked by Google Analytics. The company warned two months ago, in the midst of loud privacy-related complaints, that it was working on such a tool. Google says the plugin will work in the following browsers: Internet Explorer, versions 7 and 8Mozilla Firefox, 3.x and higherGoogle Chrome It’s not available for Safari, but Google’s Brian Richardson hinted that may change in the future by saying today’s announcement is a “first step” and that Google hopes to “build continuous improvements moving forward.” In its announcement today, Google positions this as a win for user control and privacy. As I pointed out in our previous article, this is a smart move for Google; they’ll be able to tout this as a feather in their cap when it comes time to field complaints about user privacy. It’s anyone’s guess how many web searchers will even be aware that the plugin exists, much less use it.
“We’re not sure [what to expect]. Google Dashboard Offers New Privacy Controls. Google has launched a new privacy dashboard — technically just called Google Dashboard — that gives users quicker access to, and more control over, the personal information stored in Google’s databases. The dashboard is a one-stop shop for managing this data and the settings that are associated with the Google products you use when signed in to your Google account. “We recognize how important our users’ trust is, so we’re looking for ways to be more transparent,” says Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety. “Over the last 11 years we’ve launched a lot of products, so we wanted to provide more transparency for people using those products.”
How to access Google Dashboard Google Dashboard can be reached by going to www.google.com/dashboard or by going to your Google Account page. You’ll have to be logged in to your Google account first and, because the information in Google Dashboard is sensitive, Google requires a second login before you can access it. History Sniffing: How YouPorn Checks What Other Porn Sites You've Visited and Ad Networks Test The Quality of Their Data. How People Broadcast Their Locations Without Meaning To. People were up in arms this week about the privacy implications of news that the iPhone gathers location information and stores it in a file on the user’s computer.
But experts say that smart-phone owners are unknowingly taking a much bigger risk with information about where they go all day. During a presentation at the computer security conference Source Boston, Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs and Larry Pesce, a senior security consultant with NWN, described the way photos taken by many phones are routinely encoded with latitude and longitude tags.
When users post those photos online through services such as TwitPic, they often expose much more personal data than they realize. “It is definitely true that folks don’t [understand] the risk,” says Jackson. For example, by looking at the location metadata stored with pictures posted through one man’s anonymous Twitter account, the researchers were able to pinpoint his likely home address.
How To Hide From Google - Forbes.com. Traceroute.org. I Can Stalk U - Raising awareness about inadvertent information sharing. NNDB: Tracking the entire world. Tracking Yourself Online: The Power of Google Alerts | Keyword Connects Blog. Think Google is just a gigantic search engine that knows everything about everything?
Think again. Turn Google to your advantage to track what homeowners and competitors are saying about you online. A lot of people believe that Google sees all, knows all. They’re watching your every move online. And they know everything that the general public is saying about you. I’ll give you no argument. Google is indeed the online equivalent of Big Brother. They’re called Google Alerts, and they’re a great tool for every home improvement company that wants to monitor how their name is used on the Web. In short, Google Alerts allow you to monitor online news, postings or pages that contain whatever keyword or phrase you would like. I recommend home improvement companies set up Google Alerts for phrases that include your company’s name, your own name and even those of your direct competitors. Think about it: now you can easily and constantly monitor your company’s name and reputation online. Tracking Yourself Online: The Power of Google Alerts | Keyword Connects Blog.
Do Not Track - Universal Web Tracking Opt Out. Think You’ve Disabled Google’s Web History Tracking? Check Again. Late Friday evening, I tweeted out that, for some reason unbeknownst to me, Google’s Web History tracking “feature” (the one that keeps tabs on every search you’ve made for sake of tailoring ads to your tastes and/or creeping you out) had seemingly been enabled on my account. This wouldn’t be too strange in most cases — as an opt-out service, Web History is enabled for everyone by default. The problem? I’d manually disabled it years ago. Following my tweet, a few people responded in tune; they were certain they’d disabled it long ago — but sure enough, there was all of their history going back anywhere from 6 months to a year and a half. An odd coincidence, I assumed… until I woke up this morning to an inbox full of people all saying the same thing. In each case, the person is positive they’d disabled it months ago.
I brought it up in our internal backchannel, and sure enough: other TechCrunch employees had seen the same thing — long ago, in fact. Browser History Sniffing Is Back.