Wanna buy my browsing history?

ISPs might do well at profiling the interests of some of their customers. But for people like web designers, writers or journalists, an average day might see them browsing an eclectic mix of sites on everything under the sun. And what if you’ve got a couple of people like that, or a bored teenager or two in the household as well? I wonder how useful this information might be to an advertiser?

So I just had a thought: rather than assiduously trying to cover our steps by using VPNs, Tor, Https Everywhere, Privacy Badger, or whatever, maybe an opposite strategy would be far superior.

A call to app or browser extension designers: give us something that can randomize browsing history. Automate sending our browser on a day-long crawl across multiple and sundry websites. The resulting web history would be pure gibberish, of no value to anyone. Furthermore, it would quickly become obvious what was happening: our browsing history would become just as worthless to the government surveillance agencies that are tracking us too.

Meanwhile on Mars

One thing The Expanse gets right is the immense frustration Martian colonists might feel in toiling to terra-form a barren world while knowing that their green, fertile home planet has been wrecked by greedy exploiters.  Science fiction is always more about today than tomorrow.

 

Unless I can change

Some days I feel productive, like my work is highly important, while other days I feel lazy, useless, accomplishing nothing.  That we are accomplishing nothing.   But, in either case, as long as our consciousness does not change, nothing is really being accomplished, or is capable of being accomplished.  We are running around in circles, chasing our tails, or gilding our cages.

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what google knows

In an age that border security services sometimes demand access to email passwords, and hackers manage to gain access to them without asking permission, it’s interesting to reflect on what such access conveys, especially in the case of Google.  Because even if we don’t actively use a Gmail account, it’s quite likely we have one that is associated with an Android phone or Chrome browser.  It’s worthwhile going in to have a closer look at that Google account to see what information Google is storing.  Fortunately that’s fairly simple to do, by clicking on the Account.

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