[grania]

no thanks

It's listening all the time. It has to, so it knows when it's activated. Besides that, it determines what's true and what you should know. It doesn't delve beyond a quick answer. It's another nail in the coffin of intellectual freedom.

I had a creepy technology moment today. The idle page of my computer had a memo about when a package from Amazon would be arriving. The computer is reading my email without authorization and transferring information in an email to another page. The only other possibility is that the computer keeps a record of my online purchases and the delivery schedule for them.

Yikes!!

[discostu]

Probably nothing that exciting. More than likely that idle page is a browser window, probably the same browser you use to login to Amazon, and you probably have Save Password turned on. The rest is just pulling info you made readily available.

[numberonepal]

The only other possibility is that the computer keeps a record of my online purchases and the delivery schedule for them.

That's exactly what it's doing. You have an Amazon cookie with all that info. You should see targeted ads on sites you've never visited and ones you frequent through Google ads.

There are 4 ways to store information on your computer from a web site:

1. URL history and cached pages from that history.
2. Cookies - these are small text files stored in temporary internet files with information of one sort or another.
3. localStorage - this is sort of like a cookie as it stores the information in a file on your computer.
4. sessionStorage - this is the same as localStorage except that it is automatically deleted when you session is over. Unless the developer put code in to delete this, it will delete when you close your browser