Amazon Search Bar Will Track Your Browsing 236
Limit writes "There has been a lot of discussion regarding GMail and Google's privacy policies. However, with the recent debut of Amazon's A9.com, I havn't seen any mention to the information they intend to collect. I saw this article today, "The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way ... If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well." Where is all the media hype about this privacy issue?"
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Great. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great. (Score:2)
A9 (Score:5, Funny)
Attention : everybody that hasn't figured it out.. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you install a plugin into your browser, it is tracking where you go and what you do, sending that data back to some server somewhere for processing.
Not just Amazon. You can pretty much be sure if you have any browser bar plug-in where you type stuff and it does stuff - you are being tracked. If the one you have isn't doing it yet, the programmers are adding it for the next release.
That is all, carry on.
Re:Attention: everybody that hasn't figured it out (Score:5, Informative)
God I love Mozilla! You want spyware free browser add-ons? Check MozDev's active projects [mozdev.org].
Search-related projects on MozdevGoogleBar [mozdev.org]- Emulates the Google toolbar that only works in IE
Companion [mozdev.org]- Emulates the Yahoo! Companion toolbar in Mozilla.
Easysearch [mozdev.org]- Offers a search toolbar with more general coverage of many search engines.
ExPASybar [mozdev.org]- Searches the ExPASy database of biomolecules.
Mycroft [mozdev.org]- Collection of search plugins for Mozilla's sidebar search (formerly known as Sherlock)
Gimli [mozdev.org]- Another project to re-create popular toolbars, starting with a dictionary.
NeedleSearch [mozdev.org]- Allows users to search using search engines installed in Mozilla, or add a new search string to the toolbar automatically.
Pubmed [mozdev.org]- Searches the NLM/Medline database of articles and citations in the field of medicine.
Qlookup [mozdev.org]- Add Google search to the context menu
Well I guess... (Score:2, Insightful)
No-one thought there would be much difference in having another piece of spyware on your machine. I mean 29? 30? So what. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/16/172923 8&mode=nested&tid=109&tid=126&tid=172&tid=185&tid= 187&tid=190&tid=201
Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess which one is going to be slammed by the "traditional media" time and again.
Google toolbar does the same damned thing (Score:2)
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
There has been a lot of discussion regarding GMail and Google's privacy policies. However, with the recent debut of Amazon's A9.com, I havn't seen any mention to the information they intend to collect.
My point was directed at that. We've seen doomsayers on newspapers about GMail and even some dumbass politician who was drafting a law to make it illegal, yet this toolbar has pretty much been launched without even a side comment from them.
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
I think a lot of the criticism that's been levelled at Google has been motivated by the fact that people, at least on some level, like or even care about Google and don't want to see it go down the drain. Amazon, on the other hand, is just some company...
Missing the point (Score:2)
Hope it's clear enough for you Mr. Dumbass. Perhaps next time you should spend more time thinking and less time being offended.
I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that installing any third party browser add-on is only asking for trouble.
Why add another executable that will sap some your system resources while at the same time be able to monitor your surfing habits?
Doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me...
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:4, Insightful)
The same goes for gmail. What, you want a gig of email space for free with no strings attached? poor baby. Go to CompUSA, buy a *250 gb* drive for ~$200, and make your own damn free mail server.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:3)
FREE EMAIL! (Score:2)
Interesting point. I'm on DSL. I have my own IP (although it's not required, there are plenty of free DNS sites), I have my own email server (qMail on RH9), honestly in 15 years, I've NEVER had a free email account.
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:2)
Firefox has an extension that let's you modify css in a bar on the left-hand side and view the changes in the main pane in real-time.
I haven't played with it enough to gauge how effective it will actually be, but it sure looks cool!
The Dalai LLama
....ooooohhhh, shiny!.....
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:2)
Power IE [powerie.com] is a good shareware toolbar which can block popups and ads had has various other useful features. It's considerably faster than using a proxy server [junkbuster.com] to block ads, and you don't have that extra process running.
You can't say that all 3rd party browser add-ons are bad. You just ha
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:3, Insightful)
Then the "useful content" company sees its popularity go down, and down, and down... and eventually gets so desparate that they sue Privoxy, just for something to do.
"Block images from this server"
Plenty of us don't see the slashdot graphics ("useful content") because blocking that server allows us to also block the advertisements. It's inconvenient, but less so than allowing advertising to be displayed.
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't trust any so-called "browser helpers". (Score:5, Funny)
I am currently using telnet to read and send TCP/IP packets to and from the slashdot.org servers. Sure, jpg/gif/bmp mime types were a pain to mentally picture at first, but you get used to it.
What is this "browser" you are speaking of?
Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ha! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ha! (Score:4, Funny)
I just time the gaps between the white ones and make assumptions. It works okay until I use compression.
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Much to my dismay, the Southeastern pidgeons happened to fly directly over an erupting volcano and were covered with dark soot, making them black. The black and white pidgeons returned in a pattern I was not expecting (since I had sent only white ones), and I interpretted this as some sort of "l337" nonsense. With the new dual colorings, I was able to begin the BPNP (binary pidgeon network protocol).
Now that I think about it, I think I will just leave the black pidgeons here and only send the white ones back -- I only need half of the information from Slashdot because I can just assume the other half is dupes.
Evil Corporations (Score:3, Interesting)
What is it about evil corporations?
I mean, amazon already makes a $$$ off books, videos and games, so I ask why do they have to go all 1984 on us. Google have some kind of legitimate excuse already in that advertising is the only real way for google to make money.
Is targeted advertising on the internet really worth it? I mean serious.. how much is the bad PR costing them?
Simon
Re:Evil Corporations (Score:2)
Re:Evil Corporations (Score:2)
If you know the sites that a person visits, you can get a pretty good picture of what the person is interested in, and therefore, what advertisements he/she will respond to.
Look at your own browser history and see if you can figure out any patterns from it. It might tell you something about yourself. The $2 question is: would you want anyone else to know that?
Re:Evil Corporations (Score:2)
How much do you pay Google on an annual basis?
Re:Evil Corporations (Score:4, Insightful)
The only bad thing about all of this tyranny of convenience is that in the future, there will be no choices, because the convenient choices come to dominate. Imagine if in the future, we can no longer pay by cash because everyone has bought into convenient cashlessness. That, is the true danger.
Re:Evil Corporations (Score:5, Informative)
1) Malls: Malls collect information about the foot traffic, demographics and patterns of their customers. They can then position their rents according to the traffic.
2) Retail: They use loyalty cards, store credit cards and your regular credit cards to track and profile you. They know certain products sell better a week before paychecks are due and certain products sell better the week after paychecks are cashed.
3) CRM companies: Companies like Siebel / Onyx etc have extensive profiling options built into the software which are used my major corporations, govt groups and yes, when a sales guy finds out his customers birthday, wife's name and kid's school, he puts them in there are they're tracked.
4) Banks: You think for a second that they don't exploit young working people who don't have enough saved up and sell them expensive credit cards?
The list goes on
By the way, no one is brought up why my ISM using SpamAssassin is exempt from this whole invasion of privacy thingy... they have processes which reads my mail and makes certain decisions based on the content.
About tracking (Score:3, Interesting)
The simple answer: ordinary people don't care that much. And they won't generate bad PR.
For instance, ordinary people have trouble finding the options to set the home page of MSIE to their liking. Everything seems too complex. Web pages are cluttered with tons of information normal people don't need. (By the way, the Google home page is a good example of design which is easy to grasp for anyone)
Ordinary people are just glad to get away with shopping in Amazon as easy as possible. If Amazon is going to tra
It's a Feature, not a Bug (Score:5, Interesting)
The web-search (a9.com) when you are logged in does the same.
Um, just use the 'generic' one... (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who signs up for a "free" service without reading the small print deserves what they get, just like with any other 'unbelievably-good' offer...
Simon.
Re:Um, just use the 'generic' one... (Score:2)
Radio Shack used to send my flyers when I bought stuff there and gave them my phone number. HOW DARE THEY PRESUME I MIGHT WANT TO SHOP THERE AGAIN?! Hah, I showed them though.. now I give them the wrong phone number, and they never send me coupons or inform me about sales that might ssave me money!
Seriously though, do you really consider it an inv
dis-integration (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:dis-integration (Score:2)
You have the right to not install (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You have the right to not install (Score:3, Funny)
It's called "a football game".
Re:You have the right to not install (Score:2)
Sound off.. (Score:5, Insightful)
People are going crazy over this stuff, but they forget the fact that these services are not required. If you're paranoid and concerned that Google and Amazon are going to sell you down the river, don't use it! It's that simple.
Where's the outrage against Microsoft for allowing all of this seething spyware to install itself so easily? Likewise, where's the bad press about companies that are hawking this garbage and actively selling your information without permission? I can't tell you how many machines I've had to clean out this sludge from. Thank G-d for Mozilla!
Re:Sound off.. (Score:2)
The
Re:Sound off.. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's probably Jewish; Jewish religious law prohibits writing the L-rd's name, so the euphemism "G-d" is used instead. (Ironically, since the Hebrew language has no vowels, so presumably this circumlocution wouldn't work in G-d's "own" language."
It's very standard and not at all a personal idiosyncrasy of the poster.
As to the rest of your comment: spot on!
As a society, the U.S. (less so Europe) has acquiesced in giving up our privacy piecemeal: until lately, we suffered telemarketers to phone us in the sanctity of our homes, and we're now allowing businesses to track us as well, in order to get a "discount" on products already artificially marked up. And we allow banks and credit card companies to collect marketing data based on our purchases, without the pretense of a discount.
Hey, business isn't collecting this information on a lark, folks.
It's far from free to hand out millions of "loyalty card" and put together tracking systems and computers and databases data mining.
("Loyalty" cards? When I was a kid, you were loyal to your country and your family. Now I'm supposed to be "loyal" to a fucking supermarket? Did I mis-read the story of the minutemen? Did they lay down their lives for Safeway and 5% off assorted frozen dinners?)
So I think we can safely assume that, given the cost of all this tracking, the companies doing it have assured themselves that they'll make much more money by doing it, than it costs them to do it.
Now, since these companies are (mostly) in the business of selling products to "end-users" -- that's you, the person being tracked, or selling your data to other companies that want to market to "end users" -- again, that's you with the bar code figuratively tattooed on your ass (or for readers of the Christian Bible's Revelations, the forehead), where, exactly do you think all that money is going to come from?
Yeah, that;s right: the companies are tracking you because they mean to squeeze more -- much more, given the costs of tracking -- out of you. Either the company tracking you extracts it themselves, or the company that bought the data has to jack up their consumer prices to cover the cost of buying the data.
So in the end, after you've sold your birthright of freedom and privacy for a mess of pottage that's 20% off for "loyalty card members", after you've been tracked from mall to market to mortgage payment like a tagged animal in a biologist's field research project, after all that in the long term, you're not really going to be saving anything.
Quick, check the card they assigned you, and see if the name on it isn't "Sucker".
Re:Sound off.. (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry, my knowledge of all this is rather abstract and theoretical.
You see, I'm actually an -th--st.
(Or I guess we're supposed to call ourselves br-ghts now.)
Re:Sound off.. (Score:2)
Mass lock-in is the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sound off.. (Score:2)
Re:Sound off.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, of course you're right. No one is being forced to use GMail or A9. And presumably the astute (and paranoid) will read the privacy notices and avoid selling their privacy for a mess of pottage -- I mean, services.
One problem with the Libertarian Capitalistic outlook -- much as I'm sympathetic to Libertarianism, and see great values in Capitalism -- is that it requires all actors to be rational, and to have roughly the same knowledge of the "playing field". (this is why, for instance, insider trading is banned -- because it undermines the level playing field that must exist for the free market to work.)
But we have corporations that employee literally hundreds of psychologists and marketing and advertising professionals who make it their lives' work to figure out how to get disarm or misdirect our ability to be rational economic actors. And these corporations also employee lawyers and economists and lobbyists, so that the corporation, as an entity, has much more knowledge than the individual can ever hoe to have.
A small case in point: their are widespread allegations that many companies, cellular phone companies especially, intentionally overcharge customers. They idea is that many customers won't notice or won't be willing to spend hours on hold with Customer Disservice to correct the bill. And even those customers willing to pay the additional (time) cost to get their bills corrected will be giving the company interest on the mis-billed money. The interest for one little customer is miniscule, but for the company teat small bit of interest over millions of customer accounts means a significant additional revenue.
So we have people who -- according to the traditional laissez faire capitalist treatment -- are supposed to be rational economic actors, and yet we know damned well that they won't be because the companies planned ahead of time to make sure they couldn't be.
What's the damage? Well, look at AOL. Nobody was forced to use AOL, and savvy, computer literate people knew better than to pay inflated rates for substandard dial-up with a plethora of additional, in-your-face ads. So AOL got the noobs and the boobs. No skin off our elite asses, right?
Wrong! AOL's massive and massively uninformed user base hit Usenet like a tidal wave in '96, and Usenet has not to this day regained its former wit, conviviality, or usefulness. Entire 'net communities were wiped out, never to be seen again.
Or consider Gator and File-Sharing products filled with spyware. Those of us on Slashdot are savvy enough to get a GPL'd version of whatever we want on sourceforge, or to at least run AdAware after installing dome piece of crap that brings along 97 pieces of spyware and adware with it. So again, our elite asses aren't getting skinned, are they?
Wrong again! That spyware not only clogs the noobs' computers, it allows them to be compromised and turned into vectors of Trojans and engines of spamming. And we "elite" get the spam and get DDOSed and get bombarded with Trojans knocking on our ports as much as any noob.
It's sort of like keeping the environment clean: it's my vested interest to keep this environment clean, because I have to live in this environment. If the whole net, or a significant portion, is buying into something dubious, I know that sooner or later I'll feel the consequences too.
Maybe Gmail is not a threat to privacy; but if it is, I want to know that before I'm one of a handful of cranky holdouts, and all the email I get comes from, and all the email I send goes to, GMail. Because at that point, I am part of the system, whether I like it or not.
Google Toolbar does the same (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google Toolbar does the same (Score:2)
A little extra info (Score:3, Informative)
forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is logging us right now - via apache. We're logged / monitored throughout life, and there is ultimatly little we can do about it. Better to move onto more important issues.
Re:forget it (Score:2, Insightful)
This is synonymous somewhat to how a highstreet store could show you a list
Re:forget it (Score:3, Insightful)
It is all a matter of scope. Google tracking your searches or Slashdot tracking your article interest is one thing. Amazon (or Doubleclick) tracking all your browsing is entirely different.
The US military has a concept called "Essential Elements of Friendly Information" (EEFIs). EEFIs are pieces of informat
Want privacy? (Score:5, Informative)
Want to use it?
The full quote:
"The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way. Whenever you come to the site, we can show you what you searched for in the past in a very easy-to-organize fashion. If you want to hide some of that, you can opt out at any time. If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well. And we are working on many different ways to improve that."
You can opt-out.
Still demand your Constiutional Right to this private service?
From: http://www.a9.com/-/company/privacypolicy.jsp
"W
If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.A9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.A9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you."
Still not enough for you?
May I suggest: http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html
While it is rather loathsome of them... (Score:2, Insightful)
Google Toolbar tracks you too. (Score:4, Informative)
You can turn it of by disabling the advanced features. It's part of what makes pagerank work.
Media Hype? (Score:5, Insightful)
This "invasion of privacy" is not really an involuntary invasion. You have to know the risks of installing such software on your machine. If you voluntarily let someone into your home, are they invading your privacy by keeping track (in any fashion) of what you happen to be doing? I say no, because by allowing them in and not having unbreakable rules then you are allowing them to at very least keep track of what they see. This all goes back to advertising and squeezing every last penny out of it. The media makes pretty much all of their money with advertising, so of course they will not investigate their own questionable procedures lest they incriminate themselves in their own publications. Just because the spyware is coming from Amazon doesn't mean that it's newsworthy. I hate it just as much as everyone else here does, but you have to understand that if they think they can make money off of it, they'll do it. Companies like Amazon couldn't care less about having every customer being happy. As long as the money keeps pouring in they'll think they're doing everything right.
Privacy? (Score:2)
I dunno, I can't seem to find any privacy concerns between my Konqueror and A9........
Where's the media hype? (Score:2, Insightful)
oh, come on (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's useful enough, I could see myself thinking of installing it at the Win32 box I use at work. I mostly just look at slashdot and my webmail (hosted at my home Linux computer) anyway.
I mean, gee, there's always a trade-off between convenience and privacy. Not everyone's encrypting all their outbound email with a note on how to install PGP.
Re:oh, come on (Score:2)
There are many reasons for that, and it's not simply a voluntary tradeoff of privacy for convenience.
First of all, you CAN'T do that. Do you understand asymmetric key encryption? That means that in order to encrypt email you're sending TO someone, she must first make her public key available to you. i.e. she needs to have installed some software which generates a keypair and exports the public half in a format you can us
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it - and I forgot to mention (Score:3, Informative)
Pricing that (at least in my experience) will probably beat Amazon any day.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2)
That you know of.
Uses of history-aware search engines (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there are some nasty privacy issues, so one needs to pick the partner carefully (as if your ISP doesn't know your browsing history). What is interesting is that services like A9 and GMail create a new level of personalization in which the massive technological scope of an Amazon or Google is put to work for individuals.
Re:Uses of history-aware search engines (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uses of history-aware search engines (Score:2)
Re:Uses of history-aware search engines (Score:2)
Internet Explorer Tracks you too! (Score:5, Funny)
It must have been that last service pack I downloaded or that damn Auto Update, but you'll never believe it. INTERNET EXPLORER TRACKS YOUR BROWSING! Not only does it track every link you click on it also saves every image or web page you view. I found a hidden cache of html, images, flash files, audio files... everything I've looked at for weeks was there!
There was even a whole folder full of thousands of cookies! Websites sometimes use them I'm told, but that damn microsoft has been stealing them from websites I browse and backing them up in a secret folder on my hard drive. I deleted them and now all my web site preferences are gone and some of the sites I use don't log me in automatically anymore. Microsoft must have detected that I deleted them and they are demonstrating their power over me.
Well that's it I've had it I'm not going to take it any more! I'm switching to Mozilla today. Take that Microsoft.
P.S. Wal-Mart is switching everything to RFID tags, but that's where I get my tinfoil from. Does anyone have a good source of 1990s era tin foil? I've been using my baked potato tin foil to kill the RFID tags, but it doesn't always stick right and the wife refuses to wear her tinfoil hat at all now. I'm not sure if she can be trusted any longer...
Re:Internet Explorer Tracks you too! (Score:2)
Re:Internet Explorer Tracks you too! (Score:2)
Disturbing (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps I'm just one in the paranoid crowd, but it seems to me that it's a bad idea to have everything "personalized". I don't want to have advertisements directed at my predicted statistical response to them. I find it particularly intrusive to try and predict what I'm most likely to buy, then flood me with advertisements crafted for my demographic. I'd like to keep the companies *outside* of my head.
And of course, everyone says "well, it's just a service, you don't have to use it", but if these kind of things are seen as acceptable, at some point it will become so universal that even if you don't want to be tracked and 'targetted', you won't have a choice. What happens if in a few years, to make any purchase online, I have to agree to having every site I vist tracked? Is it *really* that unrealistic? Would most people really object? I think the answer is beginning to change.
It works both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
What's happening here is that now Amazon can do just that. They already have all the details they'll ever need about you, such as name, address and credit card number(s), they just added a way to correlate all your book searches to that identity, and now apparently all your browsing history too. Is this really that valuable to the common person? Do WE need to know every book we've ever browsed or every page we've ever visited? Marketing types will no doubt love this, but seriously, how will all this information ever work for you more than to whoever is hosting it?
Screw A9. Use Froogle instead. (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I'd trust Google over Amazon any day. Google was founded by two geeks, serves a huge community of geeks, runs geek technology (Linux) as their core infrastructure, and stands to profit not by selling a se
OH NOES!!oneone1! (Score:2, Interesting)
"symbolism over substance" (Score:4, Insightful)
"Symbolism over substance", as Rush Limbaugh pointed out; to most people, it doesn't matter if they have privacy so long as they can pretend they have it. Just like they can vote for people who lie their asses off (and I'm not even going to draw a distinction between either Republicrat party), just so long as they can PRETEND they're electing people who have their best interests at heart.
Opera... (Score:5, Informative)
Google Toolbar already does this. (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose the difference is that google is probably not keeping track of an individual users browsing habits vs just browsing habits, whereas amazon will keep track of your individual habits so they can try to display proper ads to you.
This is absolutely no different than if you're browsing amazon.com's site logged in except that you're searching the web instead of just amazon.
Right?
Amazon's privacy policy is very explicit (Score:5, Informative)
There's Yahoo Watch [yahoo-watch.org].
And there's also Amazon Watch [amazon-watch.org].
Amazon's privacy policy is very explicit, and they do have the generic version available that doesn't track you. Anyone who fails to use the generic version is asking for a comprehensive, personally-identifiable profile at Amazon/Alexa/a9.com that they cannot review and cannot delete. Amazon is very up front about this.
All such profiling, whether done by Google, Yahoo, or Amazon, is presently justified by the Holy Grail of "personalized search." But who needs personalized search when the cost is so high to your personal privacy? This is what the focus should be on -- criticizing all those pundits who help the profilers by trumpeting the possibilities of personalized search.
After all, 99 times out of 100 you can "personalize" any search on any search engine by merely adding one additional word in the search box to limit the results that are returned. Personalized search is for lazy people, but even these people don't deserve to be cyber-fingerprinted everywhere they go online.
You don't let a two-year-old play with matches, and you shouldn't let programmers at search engines play with "personalized search."
google's controversy makes no sense... (Score:3, Insightful)
Duh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
a9 [a9.com] likely uses Alexa [alexa.com] data to generate better search results, and the a9 toolbar [a9.com] likely sends data to Alexa [alexa.com] and/or a9 [a9.com] for analysis.
Yep, I think that's right.
It's Not A Privacy Issue (Score:4, Interesting)
If you agree to an interview with the local TV news anchor, are you going to whine about privacy when they run the clip at 11 o'clock?
If you don't won't Amazon to store data about you, don't use it.
Confusion? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, this isn't a troll - I just think that not every story that involves someone watching what someone else is doing shoudl have life-ending privacy concerns. In this case, you have to invite the company to watch you in the first place! If I invite, say, a plumber or electrician into my house, I'm going to have to accept the fact that they may see (shock! horror!) me going about my normal everyday business.
If some of these privacy advocates had their way, none of us would talk to or interact with anyone else *ever*.
Re:Google toolbar does the same (Score:5, Insightful)
a. searched google
b. searched Amazon's Inside the Book
c. kept a running blog to document your thoughts on all the pages you visit
used your history bar in your browser
Bringing all this functionality together in one app adds value to me.
This has worked for me in the trial phase... will have to rethink the long-term privacy implications in a couple weeks.
Re:F Amazon (Score:2, Interesting)
So remember next time you are reading the privicy policy (if anyone does, unlike me
Privacy, that's all I need! (Score:4, Funny)
And while I'm quoting from the Jerk, my all time favorite...
I don't care about losing all the money. It's losing all the stuff.
Compliments of IMDB [imdb.com]
Re:the hype is here.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The concern with GMail seems to be overblown as was indicated here on
Re:the hype is here.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the hype is here.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"They're reading my email!" So? The SMTP server that delivered your email read it. The Pop3/IMAP servers that display your email read it. Any spam filters or virus scanners on your email server read it. And many of these have logged the source, logged the subject, and in the case of Bayesian filters, logged keywords present in the email. Many, many computers have read your email -- but we're to be outraged that google is "diabolically" adding one more to the list?
"They're tracking my browsing!" Amazon ALREADY tracks your browsing. They follow you through every web page that has an Amazon graphic and they look up referrers to see what you like. The toolbar just makes it easier.
Honestly, guys, it's silly to get upset and threaten legislation over privacy issues with an OPTIONAL privately run service. If I want to call up Macy's and tell them everything I did today so they can suggest products I want to buy, that should be my choice. If Google and Amazon are honest about collecting this info, and people still use the service, than where's the problem? Personally, I'm less wierded out by machines offering me things automatically than I am by PEOPLE offering me things through intuition. At least no computer will ever read my spam and wonder, "What kind of a guy gets all this barnyard porn?"
Re:the hype is here.... (Score:2)
Yep, exactly why I said the concerns with GMail appeared to be overblown.
"They're tracking my browsing!" Amazon ALREADY tracks your browsing. They follow you through every web page that has an Amazon graphic and they look up referrers to see what you like.
I added the emphasis to your quote. Now, look at this quote from the article:
If you install the toolbar, then
Re:What's this?? (Score:2, Insightful)
if you want amazon to store all your web browsing and search history then that's fine, but there's certainly a difference.
personally, i don't want them targeting products to me based on my browsing/searching habits because i just don't agree with that sort of marketing technique.
Re:Get A Life (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:2 questions (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's called Mozilla [mozilla.org].
Or were you expecting programmers to waste time trying to salvage IE?