You On Top

They know who you are, they know what you like, they know what you’re into and they even know what mood you’re in. I am still not sure if enemy is the right term, but search engines have been tracking your whereabouts for years now. The recent AOL mistake of publishing their user’s search terms had shown how easy it is to track surfers, find trends in their searched and in some cases even find their names.
So what can you do to maintain a bit of that privacy we used to have before the Internet days? A new Firefox extension called Track Me Not may be a useful solution:

TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.

The extension will allow you to edit the list of words used, to “confuse the enemy” and seem to work fine so far (for me). John Bettelle, on the other hand, had to add “Now, who will be first to make this illegal or against TOS? The search companies, or the government?!”

Now this is an interesting piece about a recent case filed against Target.com for lack of accessibility in their website.

It seems as if Target is being sued for having it’s site inaccessible to the blind…

A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target’s website (http://www.target.com) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target’s motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.

So far I can understand that this applies to sites which have an actual presence / storefront, and doesn’t apply to Internet only merchants, however, if you have a company blog that represents a business with a storefront you may want to take precautions…

[via Threadwatch]