Obfuscate: To darken, To make obscure. To be evasive, unclear or confusing. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.
Guilty: Facebook, Twitter and Google.
A recent investigation by the Wall Street journal into the use of "LIKE" buttons and widgets placed on thousands of major sites, signaled yet another serious breach of ethics that will surely have the privacy police up in arms.
It appears these buttons capture a user's visit to the site and feeds it back to the originator. The kicker is that you need not click on the button. Your visit is automatically logged by the likes of Facebook.
Their explanations obfuscate. Do we really believe when they tell us they don't use the data? If so, why are the visits tracked in the first place.
Their real response should be .... We know you're too stupid to understand what we do and we don't want to tell you why we're doing it but we're going to do it anyway.
Gotcha!
Read the story here.
Guilty: Facebook, Twitter and Google.
A recent investigation by the Wall Street journal into the use of "LIKE" buttons and widgets placed on thousands of major sites, signaled yet another serious breach of ethics that will surely have the privacy police up in arms.
It appears these buttons capture a user's visit to the site and feeds it back to the originator. The kicker is that you need not click on the button. Your visit is automatically logged by the likes of Facebook.
Their explanations obfuscate. Do we really believe when they tell us they don't use the data? If so, why are the visits tracked in the first place.
Their real response should be .... We know you're too stupid to understand what we do and we don't want to tell you why we're doing it but we're going to do it anyway.
Gotcha!
Read the story here.
Posts
1 comment:
As I started reading the article, I was thinking, with regards to data collection across thousands of sites, FB and Google are doing the same thing that ad networks have been doing for years. What's the big deal?
Then I thought about how they tie all those site visits to my PII, and may share that with my social network whether I click the Like button or not. It's creepy.
I think I'll delete my FB cookie and block them from setting a new one and or cancel the service. As for Google, deleting and blocking their cookie will likely negative consequences.
Thanks for posting this.
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