Do you know what They know about what you do?

Very good summary of the fine art of datamining by the WSJ, all you ever need to know is contained in this sentence:

Consider Dataium LLC, the company that can track car shoppers like Mr. Morar. Dataium said that shoppers' Web browsing is still anonymous, even though it can be tied to their names.The reason: Dataium does not give dealers click-by-click details of people's Web surfing history but rather an analysis of their interests.

In other words, they know who you are, its just that Dataium haven't decided to sell that data on - yet. That "yet" is turning to "now" though:

The use of real identities across the Web is going mainstream at a rapid clip. A Wall Street Journal examination of nearly 1,000 top websites found that 75% now include code from social networks, such as Facebook's "Like" or Twitter's "Tweet" buttons. Such code can match people's identities with their Web-browsing activities on an unprecedented scale and can even track a user's arrival on a page if the button is never clicked.

In separate research, the Journal examined what happens when people logged in to roughly 70 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user's real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies. One major dating site passed along a person's self-reported sexual orientation and drug-use habits to advertising companies.

To repeat "One major dating site passed along a person's self-reported sexual orientation and drug-use habits to advertising companies". All it takes is a decision by some company who has a bit of your datato cross the Rubicon of unique identity handoffs, and bingo - you're outed. No one will tell you, so you have no say.

Now this has been happening for a while - heck, we've been railing about it for 5 years - but I don't think most people realise how prevalent it is:

Today, a single Web page can contain computer code from dozens of different ad companies or tracking firms. These separate chunks of code often share information with each other. For example: If, like Mr. Morar the car-shopper, you give your name to a website, it can sometimes be seen by other companies with ads or special coding on the site.

It's so easy to share such information that many of the sites the Journal contacted said they were doing so accidentally. The problem is easy to solve, but it has persisted for years.

Craig Wills, a computer-science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, published research in 2011 showing that 56% of more than 100 websites leaked pieces of private information in ways similar to those found in the Journal's study. "Information goes in, but we don't know if it's being dropped and ignored or saved for later use," he said.

And if you are on a Social Network, its worse:

The rise of social networks is also making it easier to tie people's real identities to their online behavior. The "Like" button, for instance, can send information back to Facebook whenever Facebook users visit pages that have the button, even if they don't click it.

These buttons and related code give social networks, which often know people's real names, an unprecedented overview of online behavior. The Journal found that Facebook code appears on 67% of the more than 900 sites of the top 1,000 that were scanned by BuiltWith.com, a service that examines websites and the technologies they use. That is up from about 63% a year or so ago. Code from Twitter Inc. was on nearly 54% of sites, up from 43%. Code from the Google+ social network was on almost 30% of sites examined, up from just 12% in December 2011.

We have been continually amazed at how little people seem to care about privacy, our experience in talking to people over the last few years is they don't seem to be able to conceive that these organisations could do this, sually don't believe they would, and seem to have very little grasp of what the outcome could mean.

Hopefully an article like this, in something like the WSJ, will help increase awareness among the sort of people who could change opinion.