tracking | Chris Aldrich

I've had a fascination with maps for as long as I can remember. During family road trips to San Francisco I remember tracing our route on a map with a highlighter in real-time. Many, many years later, I am able to trace my route automatically with a GPS receiver on my phone. https://aaronparecki.com...

Aaron has really done some awesome map related work with his GPS tracking. Looking at just his personal map data for a year or two will give you an idea about how much other corporations can gain from tracking millions of people this way.

Looking at some of the map pins like for Target on his map will tell you that Google could potentially be using aggregate data about visits to companies as a way of knowing how well or poorly a company is doing and then using that data to make bets for or against companies in the stock market. This could give them the ability to front run investments if they wanted to.

Read Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone? by

Doc Searles (Doc Searls Weblog)

Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone’s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your informatio…

Holy crap that’s a lot of tracking for one site. What’s worse is that I can’t imagine really what or how they would honestly be monetizing it to their own benefit without selling me out as a person.

Replied to Group Chat Rules by Randall Munroe (xkcd)

2. SHOW YOU CARE BY TRIMMING THE TRACKING JUNK OFF LINKS YOU PASTE. ❧

There’s a tool for that by the way.

Read Google uses Gmail to track a history of things you buy — and it's hard to delete by

Todd Haselton,Megan Graham (CNBC)

Google collects the purchases you've made, including from other stores and sites such as Amazon, and saves them on a page called Purchases.

Apparently https://myaccount.google.com/purchases is a reasonable place one could start for creating acquisition posts on their website. The downside is the realization that Google is tracking all of this without making it more obvious.

👓 Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking | Future Releases | Mozilla

Read Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking by Nick Nguyen (Future Releases | Mozilla)

Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.