Data Mining Counter measures - someone is always watching

[pipeguy]

Lately I find that many pages and sites are slow to load, some so slow that I end up closing the link. Understand that I spend a lot of time online at work and at home and I've got so called fast connections (75 MPS Fios at home, high speed USGov network at work).

You might also notice that when you check out certain topics, say new cars, you get tons of ads soon thereafter for cars or whatever you were researching. We all have heard about AdWords from Google, but there are tons of cookies, scripts and widgets that track every page you visit to keep track of your activities, even in so called anonymous mode. Most of us have pop ups blocked, if for nothing else they are annoying, but that's old school data mining.

I recently looked into this, because between MS IE and Google Chrome, it's getting harder and harder to use the "speed" I pay for each month online. There is also a lot of concern over online privacy, aka NSA, Patriot Act section 215, etc. so I looked into it a bit for work. You can of course spend hours/days looking at the source code for each page to see back ground functions if you can keep from falling asleep going through thousands of lines of HTML.

One application that was mentioned, and I'm sure there are others, was "Ghostery" (look it up) which I installed as an extension on both Chrome and MS IE. This program allows you to block scripts and widgets such as AdWords (et al), but the most impressive thing about it is it exposes how many of these programs are running on a site and data mining your activities. Some sites run 3 or 4, some 25 to 30 different data mining scripts - no wonder pages are slow to respond.

I have nothing to do with "Ghostery" or any other similar program, but once installed, you can at least choose which background scripts to allow to run and if nothing else speed up your system a bit while keeping a little privacy - well, until they counter measure your counter measure.  It's also interesting to see which credit related sites use heavy data mining (Credit Karma a lot more than MYFico).

[Gunnar419]

Good for you, pipeguy. It's surprising how few people take steps against being tracked online.

Although I've tried Ghostery in the past, I found that it slowed my system way down (probably just a "me" thing; I haven't heard anybody else say that). I use Firefox and I've found that the following are all helpful to avoid tracking and ad nuisances. NoScript, AdBlockPlus,Better Privacy  and going to Edit-Preferences and clicking "Tell sites I do not want to be tracked." I also forbid third party cookies. I don't have problems now with being tracked and blasted with ads.

I notice that when privacy topics come up at MyFico most members don't seem concerned, which I find worrisome. Maybe they'll be more concerned as the data mining/ads/automatic starting videos, etc. slow their browser's performance to a crawl.

[Gunnar419]

After reading you post, I just re-added Ghostery again. This time it isn't slowing down browsing at all and yes it's interesting seeing that little popup showing how many companies are TRYING to track my online activities. Thanks for getting me to try it again.

[pipeguy]

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@Gunnar419 wrote:

Good for you, pipeguy. It's surprising how few people take steps against being tracked online.

Although I've tried Ghostery in the past, I found that it slowed my system way down (probably just a "me" thing; I haven't heard anybody else say that). I use Firefox and I've found that the following are all helpful to avoid tracking and ad nuisances. NoScript, AdBlockPlus,Better Privacy  and going to Edit-Preferences and clicking "Tell sites I do not want to be tracked." I also forbid third party cookies. I don't have problems now with being tracked and blasted with ads.

I notice that when privacy topics come up at MyFico most members don't seem concerned, which I find worrisome. Maybe they'll be more concerned as the data mining/ads/automatic starting videos, etc. slow their browser's performance to a crawl.

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I posted a story last night that talks about how credit card companies track what you do online, what you buy, when you visit their site and based on "data" make major calls as to your quality or value as a customer. The article was from 2009 and that's forever ago in internet age.

see: http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/Credit-in-the-News/What-Does-Your-Credit-Card-Company-Know-About-You...

Given that they were tracking their customers in 2009, I was thinking about how I had recently added Ghostery and the information it offered as far as backgound data mining functions - now I work in an area that is very careful about rumors, plots and nerfarious behavior by corporations, government and agencies - so other than being cynical I looked at what lenders were doing in 2009 and how they've "advanced" today - frankly it's something everyone should be concerned about in my opinion.

I have to admit, Ghostery is the only program I've tried so far and although I've got my security setting fairly tight, there were a lot of scripts/widgets that were getting through the firewall and security settings. It's funny how "careful" we all are when using credit cards and how careful we are about paper reciepts, etc etc - but few care or know that everything we do in a regular online session is tracked and used to "judge" our credit worth. 

[Dahlia77]

Just added ghostery after reading this post.  Thanks for posting.  Just added ghostery after reading this thread.  Absolutely mortifying how many "analytics, beacons, etc." came up when I went to a new page.  I hope blocking these suckers actually works.  Privacy is near dead these days and it's a scary thing.