Who's sharing your personal data online?

[Guest]

If you're really paranoid, I came across this nifty extension for Chrome called Collusion. As you go about your business on t'web, you can call down from the address bar a wee diagram that shows which sites may have shared some of your personal data with other websites and you knew nothing about it. This website (For3) is blissfully 'clean' in this respect.

Collusion also is available for Firefox, I believe. FF-- feel free to move if you think this belongs more in the Techie thread.

[french frank]

This website (For3) is blissfully 'clean' in this respect.

Would this 'sharing' mean that there were vulnerabilities in the software? I assume it doesn't mean that personal data is being deliberately passed on?

[Resurrection Man]

I'm guessing that it depends on the definition of 'personal data'. Name and address ? date of birth? (which is why I always use an 'Internet' DoB).. possibly. Which products you have looked at? Almost certainly. It explains why, for example, you might go and visit a travel site and up will pop an advert for cat flea collars or whatever it was that you might have been searching for on a completely different site. Of course, there are AdBlockers that one can use to block the ads. And also extensions such as Ghostery which will track and allow you to block sites that track you.

Trouble with all of these are that they can stop sites from working properly when you browse and/or degrade the way in which pages are displayed (simply because before your browser displays your page, it has spent time running these various extensions). Bit like why elderly PCs start to creak sooner or later because they have to run so much additional baggage in the background (anti-viral stuff etc) that they have fewer CPU clock-cycles to do what you wanted the PC to do in the first place.

[Keith Braidwood]

There are several similar add-ons for Firefox and Chrome which is one major advantage they both have over Internet Explorer. I'm using five different 'browser protecting' add-ons on Firefox. The browser itself is also set up to tell websites I do not want to be tracked. And to cap it all, at the end of each session on my laptop I use CCleaner to remove all traces. The latter is a separate program that works with all browsers and it's certainly far superior to Windows Disk Cleanup.