It has long been known that websites have been gathering information about us, and most of us assumed it was for commercial purposes. We've probably all experienced a situation in which an ad shows up on a website for some product that we had been researching earlier.
Politicians are buying that information, too. Propublica.org has been studying this and is collecting campaign emails for comparison. They tell us, for example, that their readers forwarded over 100 emails sent by the Obama campaign about the fund raising dinner at Sarah Jessica Parker's house and that there were seven different variations of that email. So the messages are obviously being tailored to the information the campaign has about the recipients.
It's reassuring that not all websites sell the info. In another article Propublica.org says that "Google's privacy policy classifies political beliefs as "sensitive personal information," which should not be used for online ad targeting."
They go on to say, "Facebook does allow political campaigns to target political advertisements, but only on the basis of political beliefs reported by the users themselves, rather than information culled from their voting records." In other words, the info someone enters into Facebook is fair game.
Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL don't have any problem with it either, and that should encourage users to search for the "opt out" switch at every opportunity, utilize their browser's "do not track" feature, and disable cookies except when absolutely necessary.
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