Evidently credit reporting agencies are tracking the porn you watch. I guess they might see dedicated porn viewers as bad risks? Or they need suggestions for good sites?
Well, who isn't interested in everything we do? People get upset about the NSA and their interest in everything we do but, do they care about our porn choices? Maybe. Hopefully in a pedophilia vein or the trafficking of underage persons but, I don't think that the Credit Agencies are busying themselves fighting crime in their spare time. I think they are just busybodies!
Last week I began using a feature from Ad Block, those wonderful folks who keep you safe from annoying, internet ads. Their Ghostery service blocks and alerts you to tracking cookies installed virtually everywhere in this virtual world- even the Ferrerman blog.
Well, don't look at me! I didn't do it! Google has three tracking cookies on the blog. They are Google+1, Google Adsense and Google friend connect. I don't know what they do but, I now know they do it all over the 'net. As I type this, Google Analytics is showing as being found (but blocked) on this part of my blog. Google Analytics also showed up on Pornhub, which, you might have guessed, is a porn site. It's a rather popular, mainstream one at that. Interesting, but only two cookies show up there. The other one is "Doublepimp", found on 100 sites (porn). Google Analytics is found on ONE MILLION sites, like Reddit, Twitter and The Huffington Post. In other words, everywhere.
Facebook doesn't show any trackers at all. I thought there had been a couple. Maybe they gave up because they had been found out and foiled? There aren't any on my personal page. Your personal page might be different. I'll check....no, it's worse! I'm seeing 35 cookies! Just kidding! Once we go to various other sites, that's where the real tracking comes in. They want to know where you go and why. I was actually stopped by Ghostery when, via Facebook I clicked on a cat video a friend had liked. It doesn't usually do that but, when it does, it gives you the option of continuing with or without the cookies. Who knew that cat videos exist to track advertising info? On a few other sites it did a similar thing with comments gathered by a site called Disqus which turns out to be a commenting service for some reason. I googled them and Wiki said Disqus will share your info with absolutely anyone. They'll follow you all over the internet and share everything you do everywhere else.You probably signed something somewhere at sometime saying in no uncertain legal terms that you were OK with that.
Topix is leading the league with sixteen (16) trackers, most of which are advertisers. They go as high as 18, at times. I recall in pre- Ad Block days being on a thread and I brought up the book/film "To Kill A Mockingbird." Within a minute or two the ads atop the page changed to places to buy To Kill A Mockingbird related items. Spooky! Evidently they do this with your email too but I haven't experienced that. With the Ad Block I miss out on so much! And with the Ghostery I now know what else I'm missing out on.
It's awful that the government spies on us as they do, as we keep finding out from Eric Snowden and from Wikileaks. Is it any less awful that corporations do the same? The politicians want to privatize absolutely everything. They've pretty much privatized government, particularly over the last 30 something years and that helps them get everything else.
Remember the movie, "Dave", where Charles Grodin plays 'President' Dave's accountant friend? He looks over the books and says: "If I ran my business like the government, I'd be outa business!" Conservatives love that! You read imaginary people on the internet saying that about their imaginary businesses all the time.
Well, if you privatize government and run it like a business, you get Stalin's Walmart. They've already got the marketing department going....
But, um, you didn't read that here folks!
4 comments:
A friend of mine said that when he was setting up a program for someone that a weather sight had a playboy ad on the sidebar ... it delivered a cookie to this computer. I always wondered why I got spam in my email from certain sites ... no ... Asian women are not for me, lol.
Bex
If I hadn't found AdBlock I'd have stopped reading Topix ages ago. That site is the absolute worst, but of course their tracking cookies are just one reason they've achieved that distinction.
The other site that's scary is Amazon. They say they do what they do to better serve their customer's needs, but I get creeped out searching for shoes or books there only to head over to another site and have them flashing ads for the very same shoes and books. I guess it's just a matter of how much we're willing to take in this new, internet world.
Byline: Deer Whisperer/Luke
Yeah, because 'googleanalytics' and 'googleusercontent' streams appear in the "loading box" at the bottom of Firefox when just about any website loads, I'm diligent at looking at cookie accumulation after loading a few of them.
@ Bex
The ad was there because he visited porn sites....often. Google and your computer track you visits. When you hit a site with a panel of ads, the ads that pop up are things THAT PC has interest in and has googled and viewed in the past. Not everyone sees the same ads if they view the same sites at the same time. It's brilliant marketing.
The cookie was there from his randy nature of hitting on porn sites previously.
Did you get off the toilet seat yet?
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