Data Privacy Day 2008

[beu]

As news spreads about Google's new demographic beta, questions concerning privacy are bound to start springing up again! (No Google isn't reading your Gmail )

Monday January 28, 2008 is "Data Privacy Day 2008", so take a few minutes and learn something new about how personal data is used, shared, stored and/or protected online. If you have questions, comments or concerns about privacy and personal information used online please post them here!

To learn more about "Privacy at Google" be sure to check out their privacy booklet which is available as a .pdf at:
https://services.google.com/blog_res...cy_booklet.pdf


For more about "Data Privacy Day 2008" check out the official site where you will find a number of resources about privacy issues online:
https://www.privacyassociation.org/i...9&Ite mid=138

[Jazajay]

Online privacy - ha there is no such thing and there never will be, or as John would say it doesn't exist lol

I do think it is good that so many big companies, including Google, are supproting that last site though.

Think about this - sites should, they dont have to and noboby would know if they didn't, tell you via their privacy policy what information they collect about you while you visit.

But the data about you is collected before you view the privacy policy not after, even if you view the privacy policy straight from the SERPS, if they haven't blocked it, they could still collect data before you chose to say alright or say no I'm off just from reading the privacy policy page alone.

Secondly "we collect data to help this site." Tends to be common. What does that mean exactly?

What do they collect -
What pages I'm viewing?
Time per page?
IP?
Browser details?
Cookies from other web sites?
Browseing history?
what link clicked on what page?
reffreing page?
any of your browsers statistics, if you have JS on and a lot more etc...
if you have visted before and about a hundred other things are all possible and all fall under that very vague statement.

I know I collect a hell of a lot

Never browsing history unless it's my site or cookies though. Information I collect only gets used for site improvement granted but there is no reason why I have to, except ethically of coarse.

But unless you are browseing under a highly encryted proxy connection, which sites can detect and make you turn it off before entering, gmail's a good example, privacy's dead especailly online.

I'm not even Including the Big Organizations, MI5,MI6,NSA,CIA to name but a few of the hundreds of agencies world wide.

Check out -

http://management.silicon.com/govern...9161607,00.htm

For a daming by a US Federal Judge on NSA cyber-spying.

But we should have more of these days like the current no smoking day or no getting pregnant day etc... as they do the world a load of good - lol.

Jaza