What is Privacy?

You should know that I use (i.e., place and read) cookies on your computer, some of the analytics tools I use also use cookies, and Google and others who do advertising here use cookies.  These cookies help Google and others serve ads relevant to you.  If you like, you can opt-out of some of this sort of ad targeting through the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page, or out of Google’s targeting here.

Online, privacy isn’t much these days if you think about privacy as reading, watching or listening to things without having anyone else know you’re doing it.

One topic I plan to cover on this blog is the use of various technologies such as cookies, client-side scripting, and web signals to track of digital activity. You should know that I’m tracking what happens on this site, but I don’t collect any personal information, but I do measure who does what in aggregate.  This is a nearly ubiquitous methodology for managing online properties, and you should expect every website you visit or app you use does it, some of them in very unexpected ways.   If you see an ad here, I’ve partnered with an ad company to display it.  They’ll use some information to figure out what you might want to see.   Here’s more about what Google has to say about what they do and what you can do to change it for yourself.

Our ability to remain unobserved is diminishing all the time.   Growth of mobile web use means growth of tracking where you are when reading a page, not just that you’ve read it.  Social graphs now also allow tracking of relationships in many ways, including how often you engage with other people, in what ways, and how those engagements influence your behavior.

I’ll have more to say on these topics, but that’s the overview.

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