The Washington Post ran an interesting article today about major players in the online industry tracking your web usage.
"What they should be saying is, 'We are going to be collecting every move of your mouse on every Web site on a second-by-second basis.' But that would scare too many people away," said Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy. "They're going to craft some kind of proposal that claims to be informed consent but simply gives them political cover while they engage in full frontal behavioral targeting."
This subject is being discussed in the context of privacy concerns over targeted advertising. The larger issue of keeping this information out of the hands of DHS or other agencies is being ignored. We already know that AT&T and Verizon, two of the major players in this discussion, caved when it came to phone records, do we really expect them to behave differently when it comes to surfing histories?
This argument isn't about whether it is ethical to track this information either. The discussion is centered around how to present the fact that they are doing this to their customers. Whether burying it in EULA is sufficient, or a specific opt in/out mechanism is needed. More then likely it will be buried in a EULA, so next time you want to surf over to Naughty Nurses of Planet Nine, remember you have an audience.
Here's a few links which may help you out if you want your sufing to be anonymous.
- Anonymouse.org - Free very easy to use, just paste the url into the form. They also have anonymous email. This does not prevent folks from seeing you are going to anonymouse though.
- Tor - Free - harder to setup, but far far more secure then anonymouse. This routes your traffic through a pool of proxy servers. You will see a performance hit, but it is definitely usable.
- HideMyAss - This site offers a service similar to Anonymouse, but also offers proxy servers for that extra level of protection.
- Anonymizer - Several products from free to quite expensive. Very simple to setup.
An even longer list may be found here. The ones above I have personally tried, but there are many many others.
