Why are there no ‘share’ and ‘like’ buttons on my pages?
Many sites have very convenient buttons to share interesting or cool InterWeb things with your friends and contacts. This easy sharing comes at a price though, and I’m not willing to pay it or make my visitors pay it.
The price is the tracking of your visits to my website, what pages you look at and how long. Every page on the web that has the familiar Facebook ‘like’ button (or equivalent for other sites) allows those sites to track the visitors of these pages — even if they don’t have an account with those services or are logged-out.
Since I do not want to assist global internet or media companies (and the government organisations tapping into their databases) in the tracking of my visitors, I will not have those buttons on my site.
Similarly with the videos. While they are stored on Vimeo, what you see on the front page is just a screen shot. So by default if you’re just looking at the front page there will be no cookies attached. It’s your choice if you then want to click through to the Vimeo site to watch the video where cookies are inevitable, I’m afraid.
If you want to see my activity on social networks go to my about.me page were I keep links to these services. If you want to be sure I read your message to me use email — you might get lost in the volume of information on Twitter, Facebook and such…
I encourage you all to use internet tools that respect your privacy. Here is my public Open PGP key if you want to guard your privacy while emailing me: https://anniemachon.ch/keys/annie@anniemachon.ch.asc
Fingerprint for my key: 7014 56DF 13F3 73D4 FCD5 C874 0FCA 1DEF DDAE 635A
And here are some tips, if you want to get encrypted. Do educate yourself on not revealing more about your online behaviour than you are personally comfortable with, and be aware that most centralised services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Twitter function are de facto monitoring instruments for western intelligence agencies. This does not mean those services are ‘bad’ or should not be used at all — just that they should be used in a conscious manner and without any expectation of privacy.
Also consider other people’s privacy when using these services and be aware that if you are not the paying customer for a service, then you are quite probably the product being sold to advertisers.
A TED-talk about this subject of internet tracking:
http://youtu.be/f_f5wNw-2c0
The Firefox add-on described can be found here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/collusion/
Online privacy rights are like any other civil liberty. Use it or lose it.
Everything on this site is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License licensed and I encourage sharing the content. If you want to share a post you can copy the link to it by using the ‘Copy permalink to clipboard’ link at the top and bottom of each post and sharing that link by whatever means you like (email, twitter, social network…)