"The young generation is spending 8 hours a day online."
"The price we are asked to pay for this communication/connectedness is a lack of privacy."
"It's time to watch the watchers." We can download Collusion for free and track the trackers. "Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers."
When teaching effective social media communications to my college students, I encourage them to create a strong, positive, on-line persona. Some students are reluctant; they don't want strangers to know their personal business. They don't have a blog, a twitter account, and they don't engage on Facebook. Unfortunately, that does not prevent the behavioral trackers from tracking them. If they access a class, a dictionary, a map, a newspaper article; those actions are being tracked.
Try this:
Search for a word about which you are not interested (for me, this might be Nascar or wrestling)
Then go about your day using the internet as you normally do.
Observe how frequently ads pertaining to that word show up.
Please let me know about your experience.
