Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Mozilla & Google behind the scenes payola

[Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl>]

Michael Kintzios schreef:

> Sharing our private information (i.e. our own browsing
> trends) for profit without our consent is evidently not on

This carries the assumption that "our own browsing trends" is, in fact,
"private information", which I do not necessarily agree with.

Surfing the Internet is a lot like walking down the street.

You can see me. The fact of my existence is not private.

Because you can physically see me, you know a lot of things about me
already.

1. I am human.

2. I am female.

3. I am of childbearing age (you don't know my exact age, but you can
see that I am older than 9 and younger than 50).

4. I am of African descent.

5. I am (for the purposes of this example), wearing a wedding ring, so I
am or was in a committed relationship, most likely with a man.

All of this information is *personal*, but *not* "private", and all of
our collected knowledge and assumptions about these conditions can be
legitimately applied to the information you have about me, if you choose
to communicate with me, in order to improve the odds of successful
communication (whatever your purpose in successfully communicating with
me may be).

Now, if you don't happen to be looking out the window at that moment, or
if I go out of my way to disguise myself in order to conceal as much of
this information as possible, you won't see me, or you won't see me as I
am, but that does not make the above information private. It just makes
it public information that I am keeping from you.

The Internet is a public street. The fact that I'm "on" it is not
private. The location that I started from and the location I'm going to
is not private, any more than the fact that I left my house and went to
the butcher's three blocks away is... and now you know I'm a meat eater,
or closely associated with one. Oh, dear.

So if a "gossip" (Google) is actively watching and remembering that I
went to the butcher (and not the dry cleaner), and therefore, when next
in conversation with me, makes a point of mentioning information of
interest to meat-eaters (a better-value butcher, problems with the
butcher I use, some health information related to meat), is that some
kind of crime?

And here I thought that was "forming a relationship".

I understand that "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not
out to get you", but this seems a bit excessively cautious to me.

Not to mention that all of this watching and remembering is done by
Google, not Firefox per se-- especially if you control your cookie
settings (Preferences=>Privacy=>Cookies=>Enable only for the originating
website). I mean, if a Google search sets cookies from not-visited
websites, and those cookies generate a profit, who are the not-visited
websites paying? Not Mozilla... they'd be paying Google, who has already
paid some portion of those profits to Mozilla for the default search
engine spot and is unlikely to be sharing further revenue. Why would they?

These issues are indeed worthy of watching (business practices usually
are), but honestly, don't we have higher-priority "privacy" and security
issues on our plates?

Holly
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