Slate "Likes" Irony On Privacy

Slate magazine has this good article on safeguarding your children's online privacy. The article focuses on how Facebook works to tie your real life to your online identity, is building facial recognition databases, behavioral databases and social connection databases that extend well beyond your Facebook friends list. This should give you pause not just for your children's privacy of course.

The irony? You can't post to Slate unless you have an account on one of the big social networking sites: Facebook, Yahoo, Google or Twitter. Of course, I have to have a Google account to use Blogger. But I try to diversify. I rarely post elsewhere using this account. I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to connect the dots, and Google knows a disturbingly large amount about me, but I work to limit it.

I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts. The first because Facebook is simply nothing but a giant data collection engine and because I find Twitter to be the intellectual equivalent of a lobotomy. I also won't sign in on Yahoo or Google to outside services because I don't want to cross-link all that info.

Many sites suck up your entire contact list when you sign on with Google or Yahoo, plus they all cross-pollinate with tracking cookies, and then link that info back to your social networking identities even on third-party sites. See that little "like" button on your favorite site? Facebook knows you were there, even if you didn't click "like." If the site doesn't have a "like" button, they're probably serving ads from a major ad agency, and the fact that you viewed the ad is purchaseable info. All they have to do is link the ad cookie with your Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr cookies and they can add that info into the massive online profile of Everything You've Ever Done On the Internet. That exploratory foray into broccoli-fetish.com? That Google search for "hot sexy livestock?" Oh, yeah, they know about all that. And they can tie it to you. Individually. Probably to your real name.

What all that means is, at Slate, and many sites, unless you're willing to buy into the whole privacy-robbing social networking industrial complex, they don't want to hear from you. In fact, the sites that don't tie into one of the major social networking sites or one of the commenting service giants like Disqus or Livefyre, are getting few and far between.

You can try to obfuscate, but unless you're willing to live the life of a serious privacy wonk, using Tor and anti-tracking software, you're probably failing.

So: write articles about protecting your privacy. Require you to sacrifice all your privacy to comment.

Nice.