AFTER LISTENING TO Jeff Jarvis for more than 40 hours, I'm sold on both the necessity to let some of my online life remain public. But I'm also a little concerned about persistent electronic data.
I've had a few experiences where some companies know about me before I declare any credentials online. Google seems to correlate my home router with advertisements that fit nicely with my wife's browsing habits. On several occasions, her iPad has displayed ads that would have been tailored to the home broadband router's identity, not to any Javascript cookie on her viewing device. LinkedIn addresses me via my Flickr e-mail identity, not through my LinkedIn account e-mail. It gets this information from a persistent cookie served by Yahoo!
Two years ago, Samy Kamkar described how the Evercookie Javascript API produces extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal is to identify a client even after they've removed standard cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and others. As we move towards HTML 5 on laptops and mobile phones, we're moving closer to a world where we're all displaying those public parts that Jeff Jarvis cites in his book. If you're a creature of habit and your browsing patterns follow a set routine, I don't think there's much you can do about keeping yourself totally cloaked.
Jeff Jarvis -- Public Parts ISBN 978-1451636000
Tanzina Vega -- "New Web Code Draws Concern over Privacy Risks" in the New York Times, October 10, 2010.
