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Privacy Online: Possible?

This post was inspired by an article entitled Social Media Privacy is an Oxymoron. It sparked some thoughts for me around how one can achieve at least *some* privacy online; assuming this is important to you because for a surprising number of people, it isn’t.

First off – Facebook. Many informative posts have been written about controlling your privacy or removing yourself from Facebook altogether. Some high-profile Facebook users are taking a stand against recent changes on Facebook affecting privacy. And you may have heard by now that “Quit Facebook Day” is scheduled for May 31, 2010. Before you quit, you may want to first determine what amount of your private info on Facebook is exposed. This application, as well as this one can help you do that.

But while all the attention and heat is on Facebook, what about everything else? Among, what is undoubtedly, a myriad of vulnerabilities on the big old web, here are just a few ideas that may help you stay a little more private.

To prevent the tracking of my every click, I like to use CoolPreviews. This is a tool that allows me to see what’s behind a link without having to click on it. I like to use this a lot when logged into LinkedIn or Twitter, as the tracking of where and what you click can be scrutinized. For example, if you notice a tweet was posted via Hootsuite, and the link provided is an OWLY link, your click will be counted. Not a huge deal perhaps as your click, in this case anyway, is in no way connected to your account. (At least, not that I’m aware of.) On LinkedIn however, if you are logged in and you check out someone’s profile, your “click” as it were, *is* linked to your profile. This enables this cool-but -creepy feature:

Screen shot from LinkedIn

There is a long list of ways to add more privacy to your browsing habits. Many browsers like Safari and Firefox now offer ‘Private Browsing‘ ensuring you that no website you open will be kept on record. Anywhere. There are also many types of ‘scramblers’ you can use that mask your IP address. These are called proxy servers. This can help prevent data collection on where you are in this universe, what browser you’re using, what kind of computer you’re using, among other things. Want to know what your IP reveals about you? Go here.

Google Analytics and Quantcast, as two examples, are now offering “opt out” options. Google Analytics, for one, is allowing people to opt out of being monitored for receiving targeted ads.
Quantcast, an American based service that measures audience statistics for websites, is offering something similar.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for ways of preserving privacy online. The questions I have are:

Is it too little too late?

Is it time to redefine what online privacy means?

Should we care this much? Everyone is up in arms over the privacy principle, but is the privacy practice (the way our private info is being used) really that offensive and/or scary?

I’d love to hear what you think.

Tags: advertising, facebook, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, opt out, privacy, proxy servers, Quantcast, Twitter

By eringarrity
May 19th, 2010

CATEGORY
Business,Social Media

1 comment

Market segmentation with Google Analytics

If you have your own website or blog, you are probably using Google Analytics to analyse your traffic statistics, perhaps because it’s free, easy to use and very reliable. Google recently launched the “Advanced Segment” feature which allows you to create subcategories of users. If you’re asking yourself “Why would I do that?”, I might have an answer…

Different segment of users have different habits, look for different content, or are using different features. For example, Seth Godin found on his blog that while only 25% of his readers were using Firefox, they produced twice as much content as Internet Explorer users. In this case, it would make sense, for example, to focus on Firefox optimisation when working on new features to add content.

Another example: you are running an Adwords campaign and want to optimize your landing page for a specific targeted group of visitors. Just create a segment for the traffic coming from Adwords and watch what actions they take. Do they all click on a specific image, link? On what page do they exit? Then modify your content accordingly, wait for new data to accumulate in Analytics, and finally rinse and repeat until you have reached your goals.

Here is how to do it. In Analytics, on the left menu, go to Advanced Segment. Create a new segment and just drag and drop your criteria. Save it and go back to Analytics.

Now, when viewing a specific page, you can specify the segment you want to isolate and use all the regular Analytics features, while comparing your different segments.

Market segmetation with Google Analytics