firefox, trackers and ghostery

[pete smout]

On 17/07/13 08:28, Sajan Parikh wrote:
> On 07/16/2013 03:17 AM, pete smout wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have no problem with limited data gathering for the reasons
>> described by our friendly web developer. The problem I have it it now
>> (perhaps always has) goes way beyond this! I am reminded of the great
>> trilogy by 'John Twelve Hawks' (which I will *not* provide a link to
>> for fear of infringing some out-of-date copyright law!) when all data
>> gathered from the web. as well as card transactions and your movements
>> are tracked by 'The Vast Machine' and any deviation from your "normal"
>> movements trigger an alert, which is then passed on to the
>> authorities. I have no wish to live in this Orwellian nightmare.
>>
>> I agree that perhaps we are proverbially throwing the baby out with
>> the bath water, but what choice does the ordinary citizen have? Our
>> current governments (in both the UK & USA, and I am sure others as
>> well) seem to be more about control than they appear to care about an
>> individual persons liberty, and until this changes, I am sorry to our
>> developer friend, but he will have to work a bit harder, but hopefully
>> so will 'The Vast Machine'!
>>
>> Just the thoughts of a (now paranoid) citizen!
>>
>> Pete
> May I ask in what out any individual's liberty has been infringed upon?
> In what way have Governments imposed any sort of 'control' upon its
> citizens with all of this?  Let's say PRISM began in 2007; How has your
> life in terms of liberty or deliberate personal invasion changed since
> then?

Here in the UK our liberties have been infringed upon since 2007 for 
example: data collected on the internet can now be used to start a 
police investigation, a friend of mine disagreed on a message board with 
a certain government policy and had a knock on his door from the police, 
whilst I would be the first to admit his language could have been 
phrased better this is an infringement of his 'freedom of speech'.

And now we have to 'pre-book' any demonstrations, if you are guilty of 
trying to instigate an unlawful protest you can be arrested.

Not to mention if you were to sign a legitimate petition on a 'genuine 
site' (38 degrees or Avaaz for example) you are then placed on a 
'potential dissident' list and have your life monitored more closely, 
there have been reports of people homes being watched by mysterious vans 
outside their homes, and I have heard of one case where the police 
turned up a place of work saying that an employee has been 'trying to 
stir up a violent reaction' to whatever it was that upset them on that 
particular week.

The obvious conclusion of this along with the plans of the almighty net 
companies of this world is a two-tier internet with the best and fastest 
access being given to 'drones' who just  follow the crowd and anyone who 
questions this being classed as a 'second class' user and his / her 
traffic of less importance.

http://anphicle.com/en/two-tier-internet-explained/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12791376

> Everybody things that there's some personal file that identifies
> everyone by name and email address.  Sorry, but nobody is that special.
> We're all just numbers and datapoints aggregated together.  Unless of
> course you personally find time to fill out every survey you find.

Of course this assumes that some nefarious individual / organization 
doesn't want to split the data down to the individual and possibly start 
creating false information online to discredit a person or organization 
or remove them completely and create a person-non-grata

Perhaps I am overly paranoid, but with so much of our everyday lives on 
the net these days, it being so easy to leave (sometimes unknowingly) a 
large data trail behind us, this debate is long over due over what 
happens to this data, and who or what it belongs to.
Hopefully Mr & Mrs J Doe are now having this conversation and a wider 
awareness of what we leave behind on the net and what can 'possibly' 
happen to that data.

> Sajan Parikh
>

>