Selling our privacy away, bit by bit.
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When was the last time you paid to read a piece of content on the Web?
Most likely, it's been a while. The users of the Web have become used to the idea that Web content is (more or less) free. And outside of sites that put paywalls up, that indeed appears to be the case.
But is the Web really free?
I've had lots of conversations lately about personal privacy, cookies, tracking, and "getting scroogled". Some with technical colleagues, some with non-technical friends. The common thread is that most people (that world full of normal people, not the world that many of my technical readers likely live in) have no idea what sort of information they give up when they use the Web. They have no idea what kind of personal information they're sharing when they click on that new mobile app that wants to upload their (Exif geo-encoded) photos, that wants to track their position, or wants to harmlessly upload their phone's address book to help "make their app experience better".
My day job involves me understanding technology at a pretty deep level, being pretty familiar with licensing terms, and previous lives have made me deeply immersed in the world of both privacy and security. As a result, it terrifies me to see the crap that typical users will click past in a licensing agreement to get to the dancing pigs. But Pavlov proved this all long ago, and the dancing pigs problem has highlighted this for years, to no avail. Click through software licenses exist primarily as a legal CYA, and terms of service agreements full of legalese gibberish could just as well say that people have to eat a sock if they agree to the terms – they'll still agree to them (because they won't read them).
On Twitter, the account for Reputation.com posted the following:
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