Interviewed by CNN on 27/01/2012 23:31, Mort told the world: > Having lived in a Western European country for 5 years, I often read two > of its main newspapers on line. My bottom tool bar usually shows text > related to the newspaper. However, this evening, I noticed two tool bar > texts that upset me: > > Transferring data from Facebook > > Reading Google analytics. > > Am I being monitored and infiltrated while viewing the newspapers? That > is certainly unsettling.
Well, many (many, many, many...) websites use a Google tool called "Google Analytics" to get demographics data about visitors: where they live, what kind of browsers they use and such. I don't know much about Google Analytics, so I'm likely wrong in the details. Also, many (many, many many...) websites have some sort of facebook thingie on their pages. It might be just the "like" button, it might be something more complex -- I know a few, for instance, that insert their Facebook stream sort of like a blog. Are Google and Facebook learning stuff from your habits, in order to server you more effective ads (and therefore charge more for placing the ads in the first time)? Probably. But then, this is not restricted to your European newspapers; most sites nowadays have this kind of nosy add-ins (either these or similar ones from other purveyors). If you disapprove of such snooping, you might wish to try installing the NoScript add-on to your Firefox/Seamonkey browser. It will block all such auxiliary scripts until you explicitly authorize them. The downside is that you will see lots of unexpectedly blank spaces in pages, and then you will have to figure out which of the scripts that page calls you have to actually allow in order to get the content you want. This can be a big list. Most pages I visit tend to be under half-a-dozen, but I have seen some with, like, twenty scripts. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my Etch-a-Sketch. * Added by TagZilla 0.7a1 running on Seamonkey 2.6 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
