Donkey: I got hooked up with CDT years ago when it was just an e-mail thing, and have continued to be impressed by their work. Glad you found the link useful! I probably should have been drinking liberally, but I’m pretty hit and miss about those sorts of things (even thought I thoroughly enjoy them when I go).

Dykstra: Your example of your grandma is spot on. And, to be honest, while I can run all this stuff, I’m getting tired of running so many different things myself. Just because I can doesn’t mean it’s fun.

I like the idea of collecting the info and selling it yourself, though, if you were so inclined :-). This raises the question, though, of why they’d trust/value the data if it came directly from you (as opposed to a “trusted” third party like Google).

An interesting option that this suggests is to deliberately “spoil” the data being collected. It wouldn’t be hard to write a simple robot that generates semi-random queries all day long from your IP. It would take a little work to do it in a way that would effectively mask your real queries, but it might be do-able.

Thanks for the Boing Boing link – very cool and strange!

This is a good roundup of the issue. Unfortunately, most people are pretty oblivious (including, as you mention, judges) to this sort of thing. And the fixes are just too technical at this stage in our evolution. My grandma is NOT going to set up an anonymous proxy. She might, however, get a pretty convincing Phish-mail with information that has been personalized based on the data that is out there.

Someday, maybe people will be so tech saavy that they run their own proxy, host their own rss feed readers, and collect their own data about themselves and their online habits. Maybe they could even sell this information to advertisers instead of giving it to yahoo, google (tivo?) for them to sell.

For a funny treatment of the AOL deal, with examples from one strange user, they’ve got one over at boing boing

Informative post. Thanks for the CDT link. Always nice to know where more of the ‘good guys’ are.

Shouldnt you be at the fair drinking liberally!