Watching the Internets watch you

At the iSchool, we talk a lot about personal privacy and online tracking and the like. Classmates de have talked cheap nfl jerseys Happy bout exclusively using private browsing, obsessively clearing their history and cookies, or using ‘uncommon’ browsers that disallow all the tracking that goes on as one typically surfs the internets. I’ve not generally been so concerned: I’m alright with companies public like Google or Facebook collecting my data, labeling me as a 20-something techno-savvy university graduate who wholesale nfl jerseys likes tea and knitting and targeting my ads. I am interested in how people react to being tracked, however, so when Paul Reinheimer of directed me cheap mlb jerseys to Collusion, wholesale nba jerseys a super neat plugin for Firefox that helps you visualise who is tracking you, and how they share their data, I Women was instantly sucked in.

Playing around with wholesale nfl jerseys Collusion showed me just how ubiquitous doubleclick.net is, and made me recognize that gossip websites like perez hilton or ‘women’s’ websites like xojane.com are incredibly cheap nfl jerseys connected to ad networks. In contrast, Google is way less connected, sharing wholesale mlb jerseys less (but sucking an in more). In light of the hoopla surrounding the alleged dodgyness of Google’s ‘new’ privacy policy, in Collusion may prompt more productive discussions. From a more academic point of view, it would be interesting to see how seeing who is watching while you browse affects people’s behavior wholesale jerseys online. For ZWARTE anyone who’s interested in internet privacy, it’s a fun (and distracting) supplement to with normal cheap nba jerseys browsing.

It’s also cheap nfl jerseys fun to see how many weird connections you can make. To wit: Paul’s tweet.

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