Privacy

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/​k​e​y​s​/​a​n​n​i​e​@​a​n​n​i​e​m​a​c​h​o​n​.​c​h​.​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​_​f​5​w​N​w​-​2c0

The Fire­fox add-on described can be found here:
https://​addons​.moz​illa​.org/​e​n​-​U​S​/​f​i​r​e​f​o​x​/​a​d​d​o​n​/​c​o​l​l​u​s​i​on/

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…)