Tinfoil Hat alert... What sort of social engineering is going on around here..?

[JoLLyRoGer]

Thanks for posting that stuff up man.. how can you stop the collusion from happening? Does that addon take into account any privacy stuff you have going on and what has actually been transmitted or does it just represent a picture of what "could" be?

I've only had it installed and running for about 30 min and there are already 50 some-odd websites that I've not visited that apparently were given information about me. I'm running HTTPS Everywhere, ABP, and Ghostery too! I've used TOR in the past but it just kills the bandwidth.

This must end...

Thanks again,
-JR

 

[Meractik]

I like this topic, it makes me really think about how my gmail operates and everything is viewed, if only there was an easy way to undo all the forwarding and binding to that address I did easily and forward everything to an entirely new address without losing anything

I agree that ToR is great but unfortunately is a bandwidth snatcher.

Edit: here is another question though.... lets say you put an end to all of this by unplugging yourself completely - how long until all that data disappears? For how long will your footprint be available to be sold, mined, and researched?

 

[lxskllr]

Thanks for posting that stuff up man.. how can you stop the collusion from happening? Does that addon take into account any privacy stuff you have going on and what has actually been transmitted or does it just represent a picture of what "could" be?

This is what I need to look into. I have Adblock+ with Fanboy's Ultimate list, and block 3rd party cookies. I have facebook blocked by domain; mostly because it makes me feel good :^D I'm a little surprised at the number it's showing me, so I suspect it may be a "what if" kind of thing.

Completely stopping tracking is difficult. It's all a balancing act between security and convenience, like the rest of computing really. Tor will stop it, but as you noted, it tends to be slow. Also, if you want to experience a rich web, you have to use plugins that can compromise anonymity. I use Tor stripped down when I use it. If something needs to be enabled to view web content, I don't usually do it. It looks like your setup is good for convenient browsing. There isn't much more you could do that wouldn't be a PITA. Maybe try NoScript. That'll help some, but you have to teach it what you want to let through, or give temporary permission for some scripts. Also try BetterPrivacy. That deletes Flash cookies on intervals you tell it to. I have it set to delete them on browser close. That might screwup your stored scores if there's Flash games you like, but not a big deal imo.

Edit: here is another question though.... lets say you put an end to all of this by unplugging yourself completely - how long until all that data disappears? For how long will your footprint be available to be sold, mined, and researched?

Probably never. The government will keep it forever, and it'll probably get deprioritized by Google et al, but I imagine it sticks around. If you wanted to do something like ditch facebook, the way to handle it is keep your account, but slowly introduce misinformation. Defriend real friends, make friends you don't know, post bs status updates, get a "new job"... After a year or so of doing that, and you've removed your real life, and inserted a fake one, the info they have won't be relevant.

 

[Meractik]

To bad I already deleted my real face book account after having deleted all of the pictures within it, then I waited the 2-week time frame without signing in only to discover that it appeared to have been deleted per my request.

Not very happy to know that the information is still out there archived somewhere for someone to grab guess that was my big mistake - thinking that once I followed their deletion instructions it would ensure deletion...