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Neil Williams wrote:
With lots of media speculation on electronic interception of possible terrorist communications via email, the possibility of adding your searching habits to your MI6/NSA profile must be attractive to the authorities.
Somehow I suspect MI5 can catch terrorists stupid enough to search down the latest and greatest chemistry for making explosives from fertiiser if they use their home Internet connection to do the searches and downloads. I don't think even the alleged "control freaks" in new labour are that bothered about profiling other people through the changing Internet technologies - human intelligence is probably cheaper and more reliable - the bigger problem is probably marketing companies.
It's simple to avoid and Google mail isn't exactly essential but the story does illustrate how disparate systems can be linked with minimal user involvement.
Crush cookies you don't like - don't some browsers now have a "crush cookie when closing browser setting" - easy to add if they don't. Doesn't mean you aren't leaving a broad trail of bytes behind with whatever you do and whereever you go, but following that trail gets increasingly expensive and error prone as time passes. The irony - for all this sophistication - Google Ad-sense sees me reading a page about web based email systems (in this case Google's own) and serves up a selection of adverts from other Web-based email providers - if this is conspiracy Google aren't very good at it yet ;)
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