Online Behavioral Tracking Skip to main content Electronic Frontier Foundation Defending your rights in the digital world Search form Main menu Online Behavioral Tracking Who knows what you're doing when you browse the web? New web technology has created many unexpected ways for corporations to track your web activity without your knowledge. New threats include "super-cookies " like Adobe's "Local Shared Objects" and Microsoft's "User Data Persistence." EFF is working with lawmakers to close legal loopholes that enable unscrupulous tracking with corporations to teach them how to manage data responsibly and with the media to educate the public about corporate behavior and user rights. Donate to EFF Stay in Touch NSA Spying eff.org/nsa-spying EFF is leading the fight against the NSA's illegal mass surveillance program. Follow EFF Australia should be getting fair use.
Data mining Process of extracting and discovering patterns in large data sets Data mining is the process of extracting and discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems.[1] Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and statistics with an overall goal of extracting information (with intelligent methods) from a data set and transforming the information into a comprehensible structure for further use.[1][2][3][4] Data mining is the analysis step of the "knowledge discovery in databases" process, or KDD.[5] Aside from the raw analysis step, it also involves database and data management aspects, data pre-processing, model and inference considerations, interestingness metrics, complexity considerations, post-processing of discovered structures, visualization, and online updating.[1] Etymology[edit] Background[edit] The manual extraction of patterns from data has occurred for centuries. Process[edit]
Behavioral Targeting Issue Behavioral targeting provides advertising to Internet users based on Web surfing habits. This ability has enormous benefits to both advertisers and consumers, but has received a fair amount of attention from state and federal legislators because of perceived threats to consumer privacy. Proposed bills in Congress and state legislatures would require that consumers receive notice of behavioral tracking and mandate data deletion and the ability to opt-out of all tracking. Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission has proposed a set of self-regulation guidelines for companies who use behavioral advertising. AAF Position The AAF believes the government should show a real or potential harm before adopting regulations concerning behavioral targeting. Opposition Privacy advocates have decried the use of behavioral targeting, insinuating that the data collection required to provide ads tailored to a consumers interest is too intrusive. In New York, Assembly Bill 9275, introduced by Rep.
GIS Geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) is a computer system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data. The acronym GIS is sometimes used for geographical information science or geospatial information studies to refer to the academic discipline or career of working with geographic information systems and is a large domain within the broader academic discipline of Geoinformatics.[1] What goes beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries. In a general sense, the term describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS is a broad term that can refer to a number of different technologies, processes, and methods. History of development[edit] Computer hardware development spurred by nuclear weapon research led to general-purpose computer "mapping" applications by the early 1960s.[8] In 1964 Howard T.
» Your iPhone Is Tracking You It turns out the iPhone may be a little sneakier than you thought. According to security researchers, the phone keeps track of everywhere you go, and it then saves the information in a file on the iPhone and on the owner’s computer when the two are synced. This story was first reported by The Guardian (read the original story by clicking here), and it is now sweeping through across the Internet. Many people are upset, claiming this is a huge breach in security, and I have to agree. I wasn’t even that surprised to find out my iPhone is likely storing all my location information.
The Virtual Revolution Blog: Rushes Sequences - Doug Rushk What Do Behavioral Targeters Know About You?: Tech News and Analysis « While relevant advertising is the only kind that’s useful, it’s creepy to see behavioral ads following you around the web, advertising that trip to Hawaii you’d researched last week when you’re just trying to read the news. But perhaps it would be a lot less creepy if you knew when and where you were sharing your data, and when and why you’re being targeted by ads. To that end, you can find out exactly what cookies BlueKai — which says it’s the largest U.S. behavioral data provider, and just raised a third round of $21 million while kicking off its third year of existence — has on you. Head over to BlueKai’s registry and you can see, item by item, recent categories you’ve been slotted into based on your browsing history. Here’s what Bluekai says it knows about me: * Some information about my job that’s not terrifically accurate — I’m in information technology (true) and hospitality (false), I’m at a company with 100+ employees (false). * My gender, age range and geographic area.
Paying the price for a free web We are increasingly giving away personal information on sites such as Facebook As part of a major series on the BBC about the impact of the web, producer Jo Wade has been looking at the price we pay for free information. 'Numb Fingers.' 'Wind Beneath My Wings.' '60 Single Men.' 'Ceramic Ashtrays.' These are a few of the eclectic and sometimes disturbing internet searches made by the users of AOL, who believed they were using their computers in private. The relationship with what we think is a free and largely private web; how we unreservedly put our innermost thoughts and queries into what feels like a very private space - sometimes thoughts we wouldn't dare share with anyone or even put down in a diary, comes at a price. Turning detective In May 2006, AOL released a file containing every search made by 658,000 of their users over the previous three months. But one reporter at the New York Times was intrigued by the potential value of data like this to governments or corporations.
Privacy Lawsuits Increase in 2010 Due to Online Behavioral Tracking | news | press-room Privacy Lawsuits Increase in 2010 Due to Online Behavioral Tracking Boca Raton, Fla. – January 25, 2011 – According to the Information Law Group, which concentrates on legal issues around privacy, data security, information technology and e-commerce, 2010 was a banner year for privacy-related lawsuits. And it may just be the tip of an iceberg of litigation to come. The Information Law Group report indicates that “There has been a significant increase in the volume of privacy lawsuits recently filed and being litigated … in addition to significant settlements on the books,” and adds that “most of the lawsuits cited involve online behavioral tracking.” Given our collective dependence on the Internet to conduct business of all kinds, and the unprecedented profit potential associated with capturing and using all of that online data, is there anything that can be done to thwart the behavioral trackers? About SECNAP
VirtualRevol: Cost of Free Tomorrow night's episode of The Virtual Revolution, The Cost of Free, looks at the dark corporate underbelly of the web, and how it's transforming our notions of privacy and culture in the 21st century. It's also the one that excites me the most. I am a dystopian from way back, and I'm both thrilled and terrified to see how we have been complicit in our own 1984. What does Google have on us? How is Amazon's recommendation system contradicting the most powerful opportunity for new inforamtion that the web offers – serendipity – and manipulating us into homogenous proles for its own benefit? As assistant producer, Jo Wade, explains in an article for the BBC: Every day in Britain millions of searches are carried out on Google for free.