There is a huge marketing race to kill anonymity on the internet which is being pushed very hard with a lot of money. Companies loose a substantial competitive edge in most markets by knowing exactly who you are, what you do, what you buy, and according to statistics what this will mean you will probably buy soon. Capitalism is the best, and the most creative and the most powerful force on eath. (Gravity is pretty weak actually) Unfortunately capitalism does so much good that we must constantly stand up against what it does wrong. These are natural techno-economical forces at work. I’m very happy we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They have some of the most brilliant minds working on exposing some of the problems we face as we move the world forward in the hopefully right direction. They stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.

From their article: “Browser fingerprinting is a powerful technique, and fingerprints must be considered alongside cookies and IP addresses when we discuss web privacy and user trackability,” said Eckersley.

This is very true. The “Fingerprint” also known as a cookie, or tracking cookie has been one of the top concerns of privacy advocates for over a decade.  With HTML 5 location info we are walking into the unknown. None of these issues need to be so, we should push back especially because these problems are relatively easy to solve. I believe this is yet another reason why we must push as hard as possible to own all our data. We should choose the sites which are allowed to do what we feel is responsible with our data and retain the power to truncate ourselves intelligently when we feel a site has crossed our line. Advertising targeted between our eyes is getting smarter. Now they can and do “joins” (a database operation which intelligently selects attributes from one data source with another usually yielding more useful data.) with cookie data they’ve amassed for decades where allowed by law with new emerging data sets which leave very little to the advertiser or data miners imagination or margin of error.  When Google was facing a hell storm for privacy many years ago I was asking why no one cared what Facebook had been collecting. I’m pretty sure that even though search engines must delete data about you after a retention period social networks including Facebook get to keep it forever.

If I can understand what data who has of mine and how it’s used, then it’s possible to have a win-win situation. We need an open-standards compliant format which houses, exposes, rates, grants, revokes, & tags all of our data and the types of companies who have a license to it. We simply must own our data moving forward from this day on (and retroactively) because if evil mart knows everything about you, there is not a procecutor who even needs to get a warrant, how long until wholesale data warehouses are available to anyone with a dime and a bad idea? If we own our digital selves, the protections our forefathers put in place would help to keep this country and others the right side up as far as freedom and the people who died for are concerned.