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On 15/04/13 23:55, Simon Robert -Cottage wrote: > > My attitude to this stuff is a big "so what", "what do you expect". > Encryption, can't be bothered with that. The content of my e-mail is so > mundane, repetative and uninteresting to anyone else.... It is interesting to marketing, since it denotes your interests, and needs, and allows them to target you more precisely. > Yes I could use an ad blocker, but I'd have to turn it off every time I > read The Guardian on-line, often, as I like The Guardian and with > falling print readership etc. ads and targeted ads is what keeps it > going. I don't want them to have to move to a subscription model or even > worse go bust. There is a point to be made that you don't need to run Javascript or Flash in someone's browser to deliver adverts and count them. I don't block ads, I'm not bothered about ads, my brain filters them well enough unless they are overly intrusive. However analytics, and many types of ads are overly aggressive in what they demand of my browser. I think there are technical, and security issue, aside from matters of privacy, which mean we probably all ought to be considering things like NoScript as standard browsing behaviour. Cisco recently reported that ads are a significant part of the online malware problem, but I think more generally people accepting advertising onto their website are ceding control of the content of the site to the advertisers, as people accepting social medial javascript snippets etc are ceding control to those groups. It is also impossible for you to assess how well a given sites advertisers filter ads, so you kind of have to assume the worst. I'm reminded of an incident not so many years ago when the default Microsoft site set in IE in some MS Windows installs was running adverts that tried to exploit IE, so you could get owned by opening the browser to run Windows Update. Guess it is good it is now an application and not just a website. There is a financial pressure to grab more data from adverts, and make them more intrusive, so the incentive works one way to our detriment until it becomes a problem and is reeled in for a bit. I believe even the author of NoScript himself is not immune to such financial pressures. So until we change the game, I expect this one will go around and around. > If it gets to the point where the possibility of having our e-mail read > is a problem, then that will be the least of our problems.... > proportionality.... I think we've already past that point, or perhaps I believe too much I hear watching Hope conferences. When it is purely marketing, then I'm relatively relaxed. But the powers that be combine marketing data with other data, to build fuller profiles as needed. It is all fine whilst you are on the right side of the powers that be. It falls down horrendously when you aren't, and that might be as simple as your mobile phone being near the scene of a serious crime, or happening to be associated with two people who have conspired together to commit a crime. Here in lies the problem, that data can be misleading or throw false positives, and often the people doing the analysis suffer the usual human frailties with regard to understanding statistics (memories of Sir Roy Meadow's infamous, and very obvious to me with my A levels in maths, mistake springs to mind). With enough data they'll be able to make unusual connections to all events, many of which will be incidental to the matter of interest, and for which they may not have a good idea of the base rate. On the other side, like you, I'm fairly relaxed on the social media side. Whilst we have a basically honest democratic government, my mostly vague liberal ideas will likely not get me into political trouble at home. And the government probably don't care too much about my interest in chess, and skepticism. Governments can change their stripe. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq