Editing 1303: Profile Info
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==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
− | + | {{incomplete|Needs grammatical cleanup}} | |
− | + | A trend in new privacy policies on social networks and email providers, allows the social network to harvest or let their advertisers harvest various information about you. A recent trend is to allow harvesting of profile picture and real name. Harvesting such information is mostly an fully automated process, where no person is reviewing the information before it is used, but rather your information is collected with other information about who your friends and contacts are, and a single automated process will show your information to people who know you indicating that you are a customer suggesting that they should be too. | |
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− | + | The title text references the fact that most of these companies do have an "opt out" option so that your name won't be used, but then makes a point that YouTube recently forced their users' accounts to be tied to Google+, where one could set their real name to display on their channel, and that this feature does ''not'' have an "opt out" option. However, this has not stopped people from using names that aren't their own, such as "Barack Obama" and "Chuck Norris" -- however the title text is sarcastic, in as much that the initial terms may allow to use false name, but then later change to prohibit use of "false" names -- YouTube was one such system which recently merged with Google+ for authentication automatically linking your false-name account with your real name account, or in some cases banning and blocking people with suspected false name account. | |
− | Hence engineering part of your profile could be a winning strategy to signal to your friends that your information is harvested without your | + | |
+ | To try to put a stop to his own information being used, [[Cueball]] sets his last name to "If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith", this name would pass though most harvesting software as-is, and may very well end up being used in such ads, unless some very clever software is able to detect sentences as part of names or similar. In fact much spam is stopped by identifying emails through {{w|Honeypot_(computing)|Honeypot}} accounts (as one of many methods). | ||
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+ | Hence engineering part of your profile could be a winning strategy to signal to your friends that your information is harvested without your expressed knowledge. | ||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
− | :[Cueball is sitting at a desk, using a desktop computer | + | :[Cueball is sitting at a desk, using a desktop computer.] |
:First Name: John | :First Name: John | ||
:Last Name: If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith | :Last Name: If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith | ||
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:How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing | :How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing | ||
{{comic discussion}} | {{comic discussion}} | ||
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] | [[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] |