Posted on 07/19/2019 5:17:15 AM PDT by 3161J410
Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are always watching you — even when you’re browsing pornography websites in incognito mode. What these companies might be doing with pornography-site browsing data is a mystery. Oracle, which owns a number of large data brokers and has been called a “privacy deathstar,” could, for example add data collected by trackers with its current profiles. Dr. Maris argues that this lack of disclosure is similar to the issue of sexual consent. “As in any sexual interaction, silence must not be mistaken for consent,” she said. “Individuals should have a clear understanding of the power dynamics of the sexual exchange they are entering when visiting porn sites.” Those power dynamics, according to Dr. Maris, are deeply unbalanced. “You have some of the world’s most powerful companies here,” she said, noting that there’s very little redress for the consumer should the data end up in the wrong hands.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Holy crap...seriously people.
Now, I'm not the site owner of course...but I speak from a little bit of experience.
urchin.js is simply a Google analytics tool that simply measures unique vistors visitors, number of pageviews per visit etc. to the site. Its a free "plug-in" of sorts that websites can use to monitor traffic without rolling your own tools to do similar things.
Its not a content bot or nor is it spying on anything you type...sheesh.
“I never visited those sites, they electronically planted evidence that I did”.
Google Analytics is there because Jim Robinson put it there. Google didn’t secretly insert it to monitor FR content. Analytics simply gathers stats on site usage - hits,peak activity, geographical distribution of readers, etc.
There’s no such thing as incognito on the internet.
Google = go ogle
THIS!
How do I get 22,400 porn sites on my favorites list
Private browsing is so your wife doesn’t see your porn viewing habits, not Google. Activating it even disclosed as much.
And, like many "free" apps, it also gathers other data.
When the page references google analytics, www.google-analytics.com gets the IP address of the user, the time, and other bits of info. Over time, that will build a profile of who is at that IP address.
This is really disturbing.
Retired programmer here. First off, the JAVAScript code is executing a program found at Google.com, outside of your browser.
Second, in order to distinguish multiple logins by same person and geographic location, they collect identifying data on you. And you have no idea it is being requested by a program at Google.
“Incognito mode” means it sanitizes your local machine when you close the browser. It exists only to protect you from others who might have physical access to your machine.
VPN
In the United States, three of the top ten websites are porn sites so one can fairly make assumptions here.
And don't think for a minute that conservatives aren't visiting porn sites.
If you don't watch porn, good for you, I suspect the number who also refrain from viewing porn, a number known only to God Himself, is very much in the minority.
When made a giant mistake in the beginning of the Internet.
We failed to make categorical distinctions between what is public, and what is private, by law.
By using the telephone system as an allegorical example as it was before the Internet, we can transfer the public and private contexts within it to the Internet examples.
A telecom company provided a public service, but your phone calls and phone calls made to you were considered private, not public.
A user of the telephone company could have their phone number listed, with their name, or they could have their phone number kept private - unlisted. If a phone number was known, you could call it, and if your phone number was known, anyone could call you (that was true even before the days of “call blocking” came along). That was the extent to which you and your phone number were “public”.
Even then, the calls made (the connections made) were not “public”. They were private unless either party chose to make them public, or they became public in a court process wherein the authorities had obtained them for the purposes of a trial or suit.
O.K. Where did we go wrong?
A website is “public” in the same sense that the phone company was “public”; anyone wanting to use its services and who knows how to connect to its services can “connect” to it. HOWEVER, NOTHING about YOUR connection to it should have been understand as “public” beyond what you and the website jointly agree to make public - that is make known to anyone else. No other Internet outfit has a right to access Internet TRANSACTIONS/CONNECTIONS made to/from another’s website.
Search engines need to be reserved to CONTENT and CONTENT alone, not “transactions” to and from websites.
Your computer IP address should always have been designated as PRIVATE and no one NEEDS to know it.
Websites can ask that you have an established identification name, password and Email means of contact. They can even demand extra security questions from you if they want. That does not REQUIRE them knowing which computer you are using (the IP address) to make that connection.
[Facebook recently added a security step - within the last couple years - insisting you identified if “this is a computer you will access Facebook from”. They pretended it was for “security purposes”. That was a lie. They did it for one reason - to track you 24/7/365 as intrusively as Google. Immediately after I completed that step with Facebook, I began getting “notification” messages from Facebook, as soon as I was connected to the Internet and without even having started using the browser - they knew my IP address and knew I was connected to the Internet. The “security” requirement was not a security requirement at all. It was an excuse.]
A great old time columnist - William Safire - warned us about all this at the dawn of the Internet age (dawn of the Internet use of “cookies”). He was 100% right and no one listened.
I so agree.
Well thankfully I don’t watch it, incognito or otherwise.
What did Saphire say?
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