Yesterday I was trying to log into my Typepad account to put a blog post online, but the log in failed. I went down the checklist: correct user name, correct password, cookies accepted, but still no luck after multiple tries. After some experimenting, pausing Ghostery worked.
Ghostery is a Firefox add-on that blocks trackers -- the web bugs that track your behavior as you browse the web. To watch/hear a good talk on the subject see the Ted talk Gary Kovacs: Tracking our online trackers where Mr. Kovacs explained how after one typical day his web behavior was being tracked by 150 sites.
Once Ghostery was turned off, the Typepad log in portal worked. In the meantime, these little trackers had attached themselves to my computer:
DoubleClick (advertising)
Facebook Connect (widgets)
Google AdWords Conversion (advertising)
Google Analytics (analytics)
ScoreCard Research Beacons (beacons)
Where will the history of my browsing habits end up? There's the NSA trying to record the online and telephonic lives of every living American. President Obama's Big Data program is compiling information to formulate a strategy to convince us all to love Democrats on election day. Marketers are gathering information to help target and persuade susceptible individuals to buy their products. Maybe it's all three of those. And there are probably other groups, some unfriendly, on the buying side of the information stream.
I've sent a query to Typepad asking how to opt out. I'll add an update when they answer.
Update: The Typepad help desk answered "No." Users can't opt out. My work-around was to create a separate Firefox profile to be used only for connecting to Typepad. And hopefully the trackers Typepad installs on that profile can't trespass into my main browsing profile.
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