Citadel of the Blogs The Inbox of the Internet (really)

Wonderful post by Michael Zimmer on Google’s new privacy video.

As Michael points out, it is very basic but it does a good enough job at explaining the details in easy-to-understand language (incidentally, the video design is not unlike the series of RSS in Plain English videos).

Be sure to read Michael’s criticisms of the video… while Google tries to play down how much data is literally connected to your cookie the fact remains that any cookie associated with several search strings can potentially become “personally identifiable information” by association and/or context.

Very cool: About a year ago Google posted interesting research on technology enabling your computer to listen to the ambient sounds emitted from your TV , automatically determine what is being watched (recognizing the theme song to “Seinfeld” or the sounds of a football game), and deliver “relevant content” (advertising) to your web browser. Google has now filed a patent application based on this concept.

michaelzimmer.org

very cool tool for Firefox users:

TrackMeNot protects against search data profiling by issuing fake queries to popular search-engines: “It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.” or as Michael Zimmer says…it is like “polluting your data cloud.”

via michaelzimmer.org