Anyone else see this last night?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-data-brokers-selling-your-personal-information/

There were a ton of implications for us all as individuals and families,
and even more for our businesses.  One thing they mentioned is how not only
are there businesses set up to harvest information about our internet
searching practices to sell to others, but many of the companies WE WORK
FOR may be doing the same thing when people visit our websites.
Internally, you may be more familiar with hearing it referred to as
"analytics"... but it's the same thing.

Let's find out when people visit our website what they look for and after
they find an initial item, where else do the y go, how long are they on the
site, what is their IP address, do they subsequently request any
information, do they return, etc.

But the organizations they refer to as "Data Brokers" do a lot more, and a
lot more in-depth data gathering... and it's mainly done for the purpose of
SELLING the information about you (demographics) and your browsing habits
and patterns.

They also mentioned there are means of blocking the ability of these
services from gathering (as much) information on you... one specific
application they talked about was "Disconnect" ( disconnect.com ) and I was
wondering if anyone had any personal experience with this? I saw on their
page they have various versions/options and I'm sure there are paid and
unpaid versions... but I'd wonder on the unpaid, what do THEY harvest to
allow it to be free? =)

I use NoScript with Firefox ( http://noscript.net/ ) It's unpaid, but they
ask for donations... and they are regularly updating the software.  It's
exceptional at blocking any pop-ups and also stopping analytical software
from grabbing info from me while browsing, but depending on how severely
you "lock it down" you have to continually select "Temporarily Allow this
page" or "Allow All of this page"... but it also warns you when you select
some of these options about what you might be subjecting yourself to.  One
thing I like about it is it's amazing to see how many pop-ups some pages
have!!

Larry
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-- 


*Lawrence J. Medina Danville, CARIM Professional since 1972*

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