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Showing posts from June, 2012

Privacy, Tracking, etc.

I came across this great piece by Sarah Downey, " 7 Tips to go Private on Facebook in 7 Minutes ", via a link a Facebook friend posted. I went ahead and installed the Do Not Track Plus web plug-in provided free by the author's employer, Abine.com, a privacy company. I thought I'd test out how many external networks the home pages of various news sites - local, national, international, and web-based - reported to. From "best" to "worst", here is what I found: Site Count Google 0 Deutsche Welle (dw.de) 0 Yahoo! News 2 CNN 7 NPR 8 WCCO 9 KSTP 9 BBC 10 KARE 10 Fox 12 Star Tribune 12 MSNBC 14 Pioneer Press (twincities.com) 15 Now, we have to remember that those counts for Google (and, presumably, Yahoo!) are "artificially" low. Of course they are not sending the information to external sites; they are saving and using it internally - and receiving