Excellent article on website visitor manipulation and psychology
August 2, 2019 Comments Off on Excellent article on website visitor manipulation and psychology
When you’re shopping for a hotel online, did you ever wonder if messages like ‘2 rooms left for these dates – reserve now!‘ or ‘712 people booked this hotel in the last 24 hours‘ are real? In fact, they’re often complete fabrications, but by injecting a sense of urgency into the transaction, they work (which is why they’re there in the first place). Once you know what to look for, you’ll find them all over the Web.
If you’d like to learn more about these fascinating techniques – and how to resist them – check out the superb article by Sidney Fussell in The Atlantic. In the past hour, 296 visitors to this blog have already read it!
Yet another reason for local backups
May 6, 2016 Comments Off on Yet another reason for local backups
I’m an enthusiastic user of cloud computing. I’m also a dedicated adopter of information protection strategies such as local backups. When combined, both techniques are excellent ways to protect your data while providing access anywhere you may happen to be.
Merely relying on one or the other by itself introduces significant risks, however. For example, have a look at James Pinkstone’s recent writeup about how Apple Music uploaded and then deleted his local music library.
Gigantic external hard drives are inexpensive and convenient: regardless of your chosen cloud computing service, consider keeping a local copy of your data (and beware of products that are overly aggressive about siphoning and uploading your information).
10 simple things you can do to strengthen your online privacy
June 13, 2013 Comments Off on 10 simple things you can do to strengthen your online privacy
It’s been a very disheartening couple of weeks for people concerned with protecting personal information. From the US Supreme Court’s ruling about routine DNA collection to the ongoing revelations about the NSA Prism program, it’s easy to feel helpless in the face of such massive data collection. And while the amount of surveillance – from governments, corporations, and even nosy individuals – is likely to increase, there are a few basic things you can do to help safeguard your data from others.
- Reduce your activity on social networks. Did you know that banks routinely check out your FaceBook profile? And now the IRS has joined the party.
- Encrypt important files. TrueCrypt is an excellent choice for this essential task.
- Use a secure search engine. Google is very clear about how it stores your search history. If this bothers you, take a look at DuckDuckGo and ixquick.
- Use a more secure browser. Chrome is a good choice, but there are additional offerings out there. You can expect this market to heat up in the wake of all these snooping disclosures.
- Clear your browser cookies regularly. Many web sites inspect these cookies to get a much better idea of your browsing history.
- Use TOR or a VPN. These options both offer greatly improved communication security. TOR is easy to set up and use, too.
- Create multiple email addresses. There’s no reason to route everything through a single address. Instead, consider setting up different accounts at various providers.
- Put your phone in airplane mode when you’re not using it. Your phone constantly transmits details about your location back to your service provider. If you’re not actively using it, why broadcast that information?
- Pay cash. Do you really need to charge that burger?
- Be stingy with what you share. It may sound anachronistic in this age of updating FaceBook with every trivial aspect of life, but consider simply entering less data about yourself online. For example, there’s no reason for you to provide an e-commerce site with your home, work, and mobile phone numbers.
I’ll be adding more tips to the list, so if this topic interests you be sure to check back here from time to time or follow me on Twitter at @RD_Schneider.
Facebook follows you into the drugstore
September 24, 2012 § 1 Comment
By now I think most people understand that everything they do or say on Facebook will be recorded. And I’ve already written about how banks are poking around your Facebook profile and activity. But there’s a new development underway that takes intrusive analytics to the next level: Facebook is now “partnering” with data aggregators such as Datalogix to link your offline purchases with your online profile.
Datalogix has purchasing data from about 70m American households largely drawn from loyalty cards and programmes at more than 1,000 retailers, including grocers and drug stores. By matching email addresses or other identifying information associated with those cards against emails or information used to establish Facebook accounts, Datalogix can track whether people bought a product in a store after seeing an ad on Facebook.
This is yet another reason to use a variety of different email addresses for your online and offline activities, and to only provide the bare minimum of requested information when registering for a site or offline program. While it’s not foolproof, it does help reduce the ease of the cross-system joins that are at the heart of many of these privacy-eroding analytic schemes.
Now Facebook is data mining your messages for political sentiment
January 14, 2012 Comments Off on Now Facebook is data mining your messages for political sentiment
Here’s yet another example of the illusion of privacy when using social media:
Facebook has cut a deal with political website Politico that allows the independent site machine-access to Facebook users’ messages, both public and private, when a Republican Presidential candidate is mentioned by name. The data is being collected and analyzed for sentiment by Facebook’s data team, then delivered to Politico to serve as the basis of data-driven political analysis and journalism.
Even though your personally expressed thoughts are being aggregated, which should – in theory – strip out your identity, the potential for abuse of this kind of data mining is staggering.
Banks poking around your Facebook account? Yet another example of the danger of combining Big Data with Social Networking
December 19, 2011 § 2 Comments
I suppose that if something can be done, it will:
Banks have been curious about using social media to gauge risk for at least a year, said Matt Thomson, VP of platform at Klout, which calculates “influence” based on a user’s social media activity. Determining creditworthiness is not a core product of Klout’s, he said, but banks have approached the startup to ask about it. He wouldn’t name names. “It’s really like the who’s who of banking,” he said.
All the more reason to carefully consider what you share, what you say, and who you connect with. Assume that if it’s out there, everyone will eventually have access to it.
rdschneider 
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