Tag Archives: yahoo

Do you Facebook? You’re a Yahoo

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What is Facebook worth? To whom does it belong? Reigning property right schemes aren’t reciprocal to Facebook’s actual content providers. Maybe an outrageous IPO will prompt a user’s bill of rights and a new intellectual rights paradigm, monetizing the net to flow outward instead of inward to the cyber 1%. Facebook is the whole world in a filing cabinet, but they’re your files, and you’re the volunteer file clerk. Facebook is Yahoo outsourced basically, because Google is too complicated for thought-overwhelmed people. Yahoo mapped the known internet, Google rationalized the database, but the social networking outfits calculated that interests could be predicted along personal ties. We’re sheep after all, and we only want to follow where the flock is going. While Twitter’s cues comes at you like Space Invaders, Facebook provided the blinders and rear view mirrors to coax the reluctant along, and resurrected the virtual community of the World Wide Web’s first internment camp, AOL. This time when everyone is comfortably corralled, it will be interesting to see what becomes of the web’s open range.

Being seen unseemly

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A PEW survey has revealed that self-googles are up, that is the number of people searching for a glimpse of their reflection online. Apparently earlier studies indicated a reluctance on everyone’s part to admit they googled themselves. I’d be inclined to think a narcissist’s curiosity is like nose-picking, we don’t expect our noses to rat us out.

Search engines, internet service providers and browsing software companies are of course in a position to know who searches for what. Isn’t it startling to consider they know when it’s YOU? How closely would you peer into a mirror if you knew so many internet middlemen with clipboards were staring intently back at you?

So your internet connection has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address (here’s as far as the public can trace yours) and your computer has its own Media Access Control (MAC) address, how do they know it’s YOU?

Cookies and certificates stored by your browser facilitate tracking your online activities. They link the visits and search queries to your computer. Product registrations and credit card payment information link the computer to you.

The pattern of your browsing establishes a profile by which somebody can reliably deduce when your behavior betrays your identity. Suppose for example, atypically, you are playing at Webkins. It could be surmised that one of your cohabitants -likely already documented- was at the keyboard.