| Es gilt viele Mauern abzu bauen |
[Mar. 1st, 2013|10:28 am]
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So, you would think that those few remaining parts of the Berlin Wall (see East Side Gallery) form the most outstanding symbol of the cold war in Europe? Oh well,...
In the mean time at the Brandenburger Tor:
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| More pictures from Myanmar |
[Dec. 15th, 2012|12:03 am]
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So here are a few more pictures...
Around Inle Lake
Trekking near Kalaw
Bagan
Ngwe Saung Beach
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| Greetings from Bangkok |
[Dec. 14th, 2012|08:45 pm]
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I'm in Bangkok, again.
We just got here after three great weeks in Myanmar. We had a fantastic time visiting Yangon, Mandalay, Inle Lake, Bagan and Ngwe Saung and we learned so much about this beautiful country. Most impressing of course were the many pagodas in Bagan, but also the people were amazingly friendly and the entire setting is so different from the world we came from that it is hard to describe.
So here's a first small selection of our impressions.
Yangon
Mandalay
Nyaung Shwe
Ngwe Saung Beach
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| Google Foo vs. Privacy |
[Aug. 26th, 2012|09:02 pm]
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Have you ever wondered about all those free services that Google is offering? Actually, I don't really wonder, because its not a secret that Google uses these services to collect user data, create user profiles and use those for advertising and whatever else they're doing. That's all well known and – if you don't like it, don't use Google services. Right?
I still do – I use Google maps and Google search but I don't use Google Analytics anymore. That's a free tool for webmasters which allows them to collects statistics about their visitors and presents those in a nice way. All they have to do is copy some little Google code into their websites and Google starts collecting visitor information. But it wouldn't be a free Google tool if they were not throwing the collected data in a bowl with all the other user data they're collecting with their services. The problem with that is - in the case of Google Analytics, the user usually doesn't know about it, or do you know if the websites you are visiting make use of Google Analytics? That's why I rather use Piwik – a free web statistics program that keeps all collected data on your server.
But how do Google and all those other "free service" companies connect the collected data to user profiles. Well, the exact workings are their secret, of course, but in general there are only two possibilities:- Store data (e.g. a user id) on the users computer and every time that user uses one of their services read that data.
- Gather all the information they can get about the users computer and attempt to get a unique identification from that.
For number one they use cookies. Cookies allow web sites to store small amounts of data on the client computer. They're used for shopping carts and session IDs on web sites that need to identify users for some kind of purpose. Most web sites that offer some kind of user login use cookies to identify the user once he's logged in.
Number two is kind of like recognizing someone on the street. You don't know his name or who he is, but you'll be able to tell him apart from other people walking on the street by his looks, the way he walks, etc. When surfing the web you do expose a lot of information about your computer to the web server. There is of course that kind of information that is needed by the server to communicate with your computer (namely the IP address) but the browser sends a lot of other information, such as screen resolution or the browser name. And web sites can send more information, like "is flash plugin installed" and so on. All that information collected is almost like a finger print and gives the server good means of recognizing the user over multiple web site visits, without storing any data on his computer. Funnily - in Google Analytics some of that collected information is presented to the web master in form of statistics, making it look like Google is collecting the data for that service, only. Of course that service is just their way of getting web masters to put the google code on their web pages.
While you can stop Google from storing cookies on your disk (by disabling third-party cookies in your browser settings) there's not much you can do about that second kind of information gathering. In related news: Google got recently found guilty for circumwenting that privacy setting in Apples Safari browser.
Why am I writing all this? Well, I just had one of these moments where I was hit right in the face with what's going on and feel dumb about it: Today I visited two bicycle web sites (Rose and Profirad), looking up prices for a new bike chain. Later on I visited Golem – an IT news site. And there it hit me – BANG! – two Google advertisement right on the front page: One for Rose and one for Profirad.
I don't know how many bicycle web sites there are out in the world but to me winning in a lottery seems just as likely as Google accidentally showing ads for exactly those two shops that I'd just visited minutes ago. So that was kind of creepy. How did Google know that I was visiting those shops? Google Analytics sprang to my mind. I checked those stores web sites and, as I expected, both were using Google Analytics to collect visitor statistics and even though I block third party cookies, Google was perfectly able to connect my earlier bike shop visits to that of the IT news site.
It should be obvious that I don't like Google to have a big picture of what kind of web sites I'm visiting and what my interests are. I consider that kind of information to be sensible and like to have control about who knows what about me and my interests. But what can I do?
In a first step, I blocked the Google Analytics domains on my computer (using the hosts configuration file) so that my browser won't be able to send data to those Google services anymore. In a second step I'll write to those web masters using Google Analytics because I don't think they have any right to forward my data to Google without me knowing about it.
I thought about not visiting sites using Google Analytics – but in fact, that's just one of the many free services they use to collect data. There are also the embedded maps on web sites and all those +1 buttons and of course other companies collect just as much data. Ever wondered about those Facebook "like" buttons? Any site that is including those like buttons forwards visitor information to Facebook. Great. I have no deal with facebook and nothing to do with them and yet they know about most of my web site visits.
Anyways – this post is leading nowhere and I don't have a solution to the stated problems, I just wish it could be up to me to decide whether I want the Googles and the Facebooks to know everything about what I do on the web. So the current state of things sucks. Just wanted to let you know. We're all fucked – privacy wise. Nice Scheiß! |
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