Paying the price for a free web We are increasingly giving away personal information on sites such as Facebook As part of a major series on the BBC about the impact of the web, producer Jo Wade has been looking at the price we pay for free information. 'Numb Fingers.' These are a few of the eclectic and sometimes disturbing internet searches made by the users of AOL, who believed they were using their computers in private. The relationship with what we think is a free and largely private web; how we unreservedly put our innermost thoughts and queries into what feels like a very private space - sometimes thoughts we wouldn't dare share with anyone or even put down in a diary, comes at a price. Turning detective In May 2006, AOL released a file containing every search made by 658,000 of their users over the previous three months. But one reporter at the New York Times was intrigued by the potential value of data like this to governments or corporations. However this gift comes at a price and in the end someone has to pay.
VirtualRevol: Cost of Free Tomorrow night's episode of The Virtual Revolution, The Cost of Free, looks at the dark corporate underbelly of the web, and how it's transforming our notions of privacy and culture in the 21st century. It's also the one that excites me the most. I am a dystopian from way back, and I'm both thrilled and terrified to see how we have been complicit in our own 1984. As assistant producer, Jo Wade, explains in an article for the BBC: Every day in Britain millions of searches are carried out on Google for free.
Profiling practices In information science, profiling refers to the process of construction and application of profiles generated by computerized data analysis. The technical process of profiling can be separated in several steps: Data collection, preparation and mining all belong to the phase in which the profile is under construction. However, profiling also refers to the application of profiles, meaning the usage of profiles for the identification or categorization of groups or individual persons. In order to clarify the nature of profiling technologies some crucial distinctions have to be made between different types of profiling practices, apart from the distinction between the construction and the application of profiles. Profiling technologies can be applied in a variety of different domains and for a variety of purposes. Knowledge about the behaviour and preferences of customers is of great interest to the commercial sector.
Behavioral targeting Behavioral Targeting refers to a range of technologies and techniques used by online website publishers and advertisers which allows them to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns by capturing data generated by website and landing page visitors. When it is done without the knowledge of users, it may be considered a breach of browser security and illegal by many countries' privacy, data protection and consumer protection laws. When a consumer visits a web site, the pages they visit, the amount of time they view each page, the links they click on, the searches they make and the things that they interact with, allow sites to collect that data, and other factors, create a 'profile' that links to that visitor's web browser. As a result, site publishers can use this data to create defined audience segments based upon visitors that have similar profiles. Onsite Behavioral Targeting[edit] Network Behavioral Targeting[edit] Theoretical Research on Behavioral Targeting[edit] Case law[edit]
Data mining Process of extracting and discovering patterns in large data sets Data mining is the process of extracting and discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems.[1] Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and statistics with an overall goal of extracting information (with intelligent methods) from a data set and transforming the information into a comprehensible structure for further use.[1][2][3][4] Data mining is the analysis step of the "knowledge discovery in databases" process, or KDD.[5] Aside from the raw analysis step, it also involves database and data management aspects, data pre-processing, model and inference considerations, interestingness metrics, complexity considerations, post-processing of discovered structures, visualization, and online updating.[1] Etymology[edit] Background[edit] The manual extraction of patterns from data has occurred for centuries. Process[edit]
GIS Geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) is a computer system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data. The acronym GIS is sometimes used for geographical information science or geospatial information studies to refer to the academic discipline or career of working with geographic information systems and is a large domain within the broader academic discipline of Geoinformatics.[1] What goes beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries. In a general sense, the term describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS is a broad term that can refer to a number of different technologies, processes, and methods. History of development[edit] Computer hardware development spurred by nuclear weapon research led to general-purpose computer "mapping" applications by the early 1960s.[8] In 1964 Howard T.
You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again | Epicenter More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday. Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not. What’s even sneakier? Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. Even the Whitehouse.gov showed up in the report, with researchers reporting they found a Flash cookie with the name “userId.” Tools: * Ccleaner - See Also:
Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest U.S. Websites What They Know About You A few online marketers will show you what they know about you – or think they know. Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. , Yahoo Inc. and others have created "preference managers" that let you see, and change, the interests they've assigned to you based on your browsing behavior. The companies acted partly in response to concerns about the privacy of the people they're tracking. Some, but not all, of the preference managers let you halt tracking by that company. The companies gather this information by tracking your Web-surfing activity through small computer files or software programs installed on your computer by the websites you visit. Some of their guesses can be wrong.
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