We are watching you.

[andrewducker]

Meanwhile, believe it or not there's a one pixel gif just here: which allows me to track you, tell what your IP address is, which filter you read me on, and how often you drop by.

In fact, let's display some of that information:


It's amazing how little privacy you have, isn't it?

Comments

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

Adblock, mofos, adblock.

Track me once, shame on you. Track me twice, shame on me...

[andrewducker]

Thanks for the comment, cpc1-nott10-0-0-cust754.nott.cable.ntl.com
:->

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would be the once in question.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Plus the twice more from simply commenting on his journal.

And meh. Privacy on the internet is impossible, and by visiting your journal I'm pretty much setting myself up for you to learn the basics of anything you can pick up from my browser. Or for you to goatse me.

Really, who cares?

[andrewducker]

Goatse-ing is so 1999 :-> I remember when /. put in their "this link goes to..." functionality specifically because of it. Aaah, we won't see days like that again.

(I still have a Goatse t-shirt - it looks like a business logo to most people, but I get the occasional fantastic look on the street from people that Know).

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

What????!!!

*doesn't speak geek*

[andrewducker]

If you really want me to I'll explain what Goatse is some time.

But you don't. Trust me.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Yes, this makes PC-Cillin freak out with warnings. Hah!

[ahsirakh.livejournal.com]

Meaningless. Now, if you could track my movements once I've left your site...

[andrewducker]

According to my spy satellites you wandered off to make a cup of tea (milk, no sugar), before settling in to watch a repeat of a reality TV show. I'm shocked by your lack of televisual taste. Shocked, I say!

Re: tracking

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

It would work better if you put size tags on your images so that it showed up in my friends page rather than clicking through.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Which is why I find it so funny when people go into paroxysms of terror and fury when LJ collects aggregated data...

[accordingly.livejournal.com]

That's... weird :(

I signed up to that site but never quite understood it. I'm not sure if I'd really want to know anyway! It's like on okcupid {I'm on it for the quizzes I swear...} there's some feature where you can see who's been looking at your profile, and other people can see when you look at theirs. I turned it off once but curiosity got the better of me.

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

[andrewducker]

That's fantastic.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

Awesome!

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

By the by, I'm actually about a third of the way through The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age which is pretty interesting so far. Solove is making the case that the true danger of the death of privacy isn't an Orwellian Big Brother but more of a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracies with digital dossiers on everyone and completely indifferent to the errors that might creep in and ruin someone's day (or life).

[andrewducker]

Which is why we need one big centralised database that's never ever wrong :->

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

Perfect! Now we just have to work out what goes into it, who gets to access it (in whole or in part) and what they can do with the information within. :)

[andrewducker]

You should hear the arguing over the current UK ID card project - which is about exactly that...

[0olong.livejournal.com]

That's something Brazil satirised terribly, terribly well, and I was heavily struck last time I watched it by how much truer than 1984 it rings.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

At least one of my friends uses an lj add-on that tells her who is reading their journal, how recently they read it and similar information.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Speaking of tracking - these are terrifying.

When those AOL search logs got out onto the internets, an SA goon went through them and collated some information.

The series of searches that some people made.

The person who first searched for "drinking 5 drinks a day" and then, after a few searches "drinking 10-15 drinks a day" probably isn't too great. The series of three searches by one person starting "hermit crabs" then "taking care of hermit crab" and finally "how to know hermit crab is dead" are just sad.

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