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Amazon creepy ...

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Renegade:
Big Data also operates outside of your browser.

e.g. If you use a grocery store loyalty card, they are selling data to insurance companies, so if you buy too much junk food, your health insurance premiums could go up.

Your phone is also a good source of data. Information is collected about what you do, where you go, what games you place, what ads you click, etc.

It is incredibly pervasive and will only become more pervasive.

Is your TV reporting what TV shows you watch? Are you ready for smart refrigerators that know what cooking shows you watch and what you buy at the grocery store and which stores you go to, as well as adjacent stores that might have a special on your favourite foods? It's almost here.

Don't think that simply protecting your browser will solve the problem. That's just the front flank, and you are being surrounded on all flanks.

4wd:
Btw, how'd you get the collusion graph entirely black? Normally it shows the sites you've visited?-f0dder (March 10, 2013, 06:29 PM)
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I thought it only showed sites that make connections to other sites when you visit, (whether by referer, etc).

As such, having the referer set to the dest site means there is, (in theory), no site-to-site reference to be tracked, (assuming no 3rd party cookies, etc).

Not sure, I'll have to play around with it a bit and see what exactly it logs.

So far I'm setting it up to always set http://www.google.com as the referrer, as that's kinda plausible (well, except you'd probably usually have a query string, but... whatever :)).
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http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&output=search&q=sex - give them something to think about  ;D

Meanwhile at the site for Bible Studies:
IT: He got to our site by searching for sex?
Minister: Whatever works.

f0dder:
Renegade: yep, it's outside the browser - which is a good reason I don't use customer loyalty cards. Theoretically that kind of tracking can be done through my credit card debit card, but I believe that's illegal here in .dk - or perhaps it's "just" a violation of ISO/PCI compliance. Obviously doesn't stop the PET from x-ref'ing my purchases for stuff that can be used to make bombs or drugs, and it doesn't stop those records from being sent to .us intelligence (all transactions get dumped on a daily basis).

While the browser isn't the only way of collecting data, it's by far the easiest to harvest from - and I reckon that for most people, it's also where the most compromising/embarassing/whatever kinda data could be extracted from. So it makes sense to panzer your browser :)

What worries me most about all this Big Data stuff is companies selling or swapping data. I don't really mind Amazon giving me offers based on my browse/purchase history at amazon, but I don't want that data going anywhere, and I don't want any outside data effecting those suggestions.

4wd: default Collusion settings under 'filters' is "show cookie-based connections" and "show non-cookie-based connections" both enabled - for me, that shows a node for every site I've visited (and 3rd party sites those sites have pulled resources from...) - the only edge at the moment is DoCo<>PayPal, though. Before adding RefControl (and resetting Collusion), I had an insane amount of edges within a few couple of days, and after a week or so the Collusion UI ran at less than 1fps :). It's already super slow now, and showing Collusion in a separate browser window slows down the rest of firefox massively - it's only really useful to open it in a tab, look a bit at the graph, and close the tab again.

Also, I wish RefControl were a bit more flexible - "3rd-party requests only" should be changed to a dropdown with that option and "1st-party requests only". That way the default could be block/forge, a very few trusted sites would be "normal", and some of the pesky sites would have "1st-party only normal" which would handle their internal referrer checking, but block referrer for 3rd party sites. Or perhaps what I really want is an "advanced" mode that lets me do some regex matching :)

Renegade:
What worries me most about all this Big Data stuff is companies selling or swapping data. I don't really mind Amazon giving me offers based on my browse/purchase history at amazon, but I don't want that data going anywhere, and I don't want any outside data effecting those suggestions.
-f0dder (March 11, 2013, 08:02 AM)
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Worry. Worry a lot. Because Big Data are an incestuous bunch that spill their data loads all over each other in an orgasmic frenzy of marketing... Ummm... I'm starting to become a bit obscene. :P But I think I've nailed the point. (I really meant that stuff above -- it's coming.)

(A part of the work I do involves Big Data and profitability on a very large scale.)

f0dder:
But I think I've nailed the point. (I really meant that stuff above -- it's coming.)-Renegade (March 11, 2013, 09:03 AM)
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Oh, I didn't mean worry as in "I'm worried if it will start happening", but "I'm worried what the implications are" - I know the bastards are already being bastards. Which is why I try to reduce my footprint a bit - though not going to an all-out-paranoid level :)

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