It's not a cure-all, but that's good. Another part of this that I really love is the amount of anonymization there will be in Safari in iOS 12 and Mojave. I hate those ads that want to know who you are for two reasons: in the end, they collect a hell of a lot of information about you ... right, Google...? And they can sell this stuff to, like Cambridge Analytics -- now deceased and renamed -- and they can merge what Google has, what Facebook has, and what your voter registration has, and all other public or cheap info, and they've got a portrait of you for any number of reasons, from blackmail to political ads. I would strongly back a regulation of the Internet that made that kind of mass collection illegal. For one thing, look at Facebook in 2016. For another, think of what's to come. Big Brother we don't need.
And for another, all that javascript junks up webpages so they jiggle and jitter for 25 seconds, when a plain page loads in 5 seconds. And it's a place for viruses to hide. Show us an ad based on what you know about what kind of people read this, or watch this. Guess. It made TV a s--tton of money. But the TV couldn't take pictures of you, and nobody thought that it could or that it should.
Just use the search engines to generate garbage information. Use bing to search for google. Google to search for yahoo. Yahoo to search for... and just keep it going. If everyone does this, they’ll just start thinking that all anyone wants is their competitors.
Do the same with every other site out there. You’re on Amazon, only search for products proprietary and distributed by a competitor.
On Microsoft’s site, search for information on Apple products.
Yep, takes time. But obviously people waste a lot of time doing far less productive things.
Personally, I use bing to rack up points for free stuff. But I only search for things that don’t exist on bing. Figure it gives their analytics something to try and figure out. They get a lot of daily searches for things that aren’t even words, and they pay me for it.
What do they learn??? Pretty much nothing. But I’d like to know what they think they learned.
Anything that asks me for information, always gets garbage. Want to know where I live, I’ll give you something interesting (yes I realize IP address info) but I’m talking about form data.
Even my IP address is useless. As is GPS tracking. My phone shows me as being 40 miles from my home even on their network (I’ve checked). Even their towers don’t triangulate to my home.
The GPS is totally useless if I’m at home. It will show me in another town that I never travel to. Another 20 miles past the town that their towers show me to be in when I’m home.
I can use GPS. It’ll work once I leave my house.
And they don’t even know my real address. The address they have isn’t in any of the towns my phone ever shows me to be in.
What’s it matter? The bill gets paid. After using the ISP / phone company to figure out where they think I am, It would take making contact with 3 more people to find me. And those 3 people are going to want to know why it’s any of your business.
What gender am I??? Well in this world... yeah.
Email address??? I have hundreds. So good luck linking those for a pattern. I throw a random one at every site.
I use a different web browser for different things too. And configure them to wipe each time I close them. So if I’m doing something personal (like something that matters), I’ll use Safari. If I’m just looking for whatever random information, I use Firefox.
No website has my real primary email address.
Oh... by the way, I get pretty much zero spam to my one primary use email.
So if the system wants to play, then why not?? I’ll play the game, get what I need from the Internet without giving the Internet anything of great use.
I’m not really worried about anything being interesting to anyone. I just really don’t like spam. And I don’t like giving out more information than I believe is truly necessary for the task.
I’m the same in person. You get the information I believe you need.
I walked into a government office the other day for an appointment with a government employee. They were expecting me. I stopped at the front desk so they could make the person aware that I was there.
They hand me a form to “sign in” and the form asks for identification information. Including the last 4 of my social.
I look at it. Ummm... the person is expecting me, and personally knows me. You don’t need anything. Here’s your form back.
The thing people don’t realize, is that most people (if not all) in a given state of a general age range, will have the same first 3 numbers (some states the first 3 numbers are the same for everyone born there). The next 2 numbers are only 99 possibilities. So if you give anyone the last 4 of your social, and what state you’re in (assuming that most people are born and die in their same state), then you’ve just given them your social security number.
People are conditioned to just answer the questions. They don’t often stop to think whether the person or entity really needs that information.
I have nothing to hide. Nothing interesting to find. But... I do value my privacy and identity.
I have previously dealt with ID theft by a former spouse. So that is my reason for caution.
store?
